Effective Document Capture: Faster and Cheaper than You Imagine

Document capture and management are critical to almost all types of businesses. Mortgage banking is a good example, especially with document work being abundant. The efficiency with which documents are handled has a direct impact on the productivity, profitability, and customer satisfaction generated by the lender. Simultaneously, quick turnaround, accurate data, and ease of retrieval drive efficiency in banks.

How quickly a loan application is processed for the amount to be credited to the applicant is instrumental to the lender’s reputation. Even for insurance matters, lenders should be able to process necessary documents without spending too much time. Speed is important, and so is accuracy of data processing. No firm can afford to leave loose ends in financial transactions. The same is true for purchase orders, invoices, reimbursement bills, and hundreds of other critical documents.

While processing loan applications, the speed of feeding voluminous data into a system does matter. The data should also be easily and securely shareable with stakeholders and decision makers. Be it CRMs or ERPs, the source should not affect the process. Now, how do you feed this data into your systems?

Using data-entry operators should be agonizing for the time lag, the high volume of errors, and the high cost on workforce, training, and individually assigned machines. However, there is an escape. Mortgage software solutions include document-capture tools and enterprise content management (ECM) systems.

Scanners of numerous capacities are the primary components of optical data capture. The rest come in two avatars, and a business usually relies on one of them. One, the thick-client, on-premise, model of traditional ECMs; and two, the web-based, distributed model, known as SaaS (software as a service), or software with services, or cloud computing.

The web-based model is preferred by most. The traditional model needs a high initial investment, in-house installation, regular maintenance, and software updates. In the web-based model, you pay for a monthly or annual subscription (no huge initial investment). The data can be accessed on regular browsers without any special software and you can use industry-relevant features that get added periodically. It means no R&D expenses for you. Further, such a system can be customized for specific needs.

Also read: The effective ways of selecting the best rented property management software.

Here’s what makes a document capture tool worth investing in:

Accuracy and speed

The tool should capture data without errors and do it super fast. No compromise should be made on either.

Support for multiple formats

Besides various image formats, the most popular formats are EDI, ACORD XML, CSV, IDOC, and PDF. Optical character recognition (OCR), optical mark recognition (OMR), and intelligent character reading features are hence necessary for effective conversion of documents, which include many forms and handwritten characters.

Auto tagging or indexing

Simply scanning and dumping your documents in a digital repository won’t help in any great way. The capture software should deliver scanned data to multiple back-end databases and applications like CRMs, ERPs, and loans-and-claims processing systems.

Manual tagging is cumbersome and error-prone. The capture software should have built-in features to retrieve tags from the document source through barcode scanning or tag prompting.

Provision for handling exceptions

There could be situations when human intervention is needed because of incomplete data, incompatible data, or corrections of OCR errors. The tool should have smart provisions for this.

Classification and archiving systems

Of course, no software comes without these. What you need to look for is the efficiency and user friendliness of classification and archiving features.

Without consistent speed, accuracy, and some enabling features of the mortgage software used by your bank, your clients and employees won’t be able to retrieve relevant data easily, and the whole effort behind better efficiency and customer experience might go waste.

Author Bio

Preethi vagadia is currently a Senior Business architect with the Service operations practice at a well-known IT Industry in Bangalore. She has worked in several process improvement projects involving multi-national teams for global customers. She has over 8 years of experience in Mortgage Technology and has successfully executed several projects in Logistics management, Logistics Integration, Reverse logistics, Warranty software and Programmatic Solutions.