This can be done manually or automatically, but the general process is that hard copy data is filled out by humans and then "captured" from their respective fields and entered into a database or other electronic format.
If the forms are processed using computer software driven applications these common issues can be resolved and minimized to great extent.
When factoring in the cost of labor and working space, manual data entry is a very inefficient process.
With automated form processing system technology users are able to process documents from their scanned images into a computer readable format such as ANSI, XML, CSV, PDF or input directly into a database.
Various components included in data processing using automatic form-input system include OCR recognizes machine-printed uppercase/lowercase alphabetic, numeric, accented characters, many currency symbols, digits, arithmetic symbols, expanded punctuation characters and more.
ICR recognizes hand-printed American and European English characters using pre-defined character sets: uppercase, lowercase, mixed case alphabetic, digits, currency (including $ (dollar), ¢ (cent) € (Euro) £ (pound), ¥ (Yen)), arithmetic and punctuation characters (including period, comma, single quote, double quote, !
Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) identifies bubbles filled in by hand or check boxes on printed forms.
One very important consideration is indexing, determining the metadata that will be used to describe the data contained within the documents.