You may be getting accurate extractions, but is it capturing the data you need?
All data capture solutions, and solution providers, are not created equal. Capturing data accurately and capturing the right data are both essential aspects of effective data collection and management, but they refer to slightly different concepts that will have a major impact on the results and ROI of your data capture solution. In this blog we will discuss the crucial differences between capturing data accurately and capturing the right data:
- Capturing Data Accurately:
- Capturing data accurately involves ensuring that the data collected is free from errors, omissions, or inconsistencies. Accurate data capture aims to minimize mistakes during the data collection process, such as typos, misinterpretations, or technical issues.
- Accurate data capture often focuses on precision, consistency, and reliability in the data collection methods and tools used. This may involve using well-defined data entry procedures, validation checks, and data cleaning processes to eliminate inaccuracies.
- The goal is to ensure that the data reflects the true state of the information being collected. Inaccurate data can lead to incorrect analyses, flawed decision-making, and unreliable results.
- Capturing the Right Data:
- Capturing the right data goes beyond accuracy and focuses on collecting the most relevant and valuable information for a specific purpose or problem. It’s about selecting the appropriate data points, variables, and metrics that will address the specific objectives.
- It requires a clear understanding of the goals and objectives of the data collection effort. Collecting unnecessary or irrelevant data can be a waste of resources and may complicate data analysis without providing meaningful insights.
- Capturing the right data often involves careful planning, defining data requirements, and considering the context and scope of the project. It may also involve prioritizing certain data elements over others.
In practice, both accuracy and relevance are crucial in data collection and management. Capturing data accurately ensures that the information you have is trustworthy, while capturing the right data ensures that you are collecting data that is meaningful and aligned with your goals. Ideally, data collection processes should be accurate and targeted to provide high-quality, meaningful data for analysis and decision-making.
There are many well know data capture and OCR solutions in the market that boast of high accuracy rates, and indeed they do achieve those rates in many environments. So why are so many users of data capture and OCR software underwhelmed with the performance and return on investment of the solutions they have choose?
The focus on accuracy provides some cost savings over traditional, labor intensive data entry, but failure to consistently collect the right data can result in paying the wrong vendor, paying the wrong amount, applying the wrong GL’s and any of a number of other data related issues that cause costly errors and omissions. So what to do?
Thoroughly vet the solutions and solution providers you are evaluating and require them to provide a proof of concept (POC). The POC should encompasses the wide range of invoices and documents you receive and set requirements for accurate extraction of the “right” data that is needed to meet your expectations and business goals.
Contact ICG Consulting today to start a conversation on how ICG’s AI assisted data capture solutions can deliver immediate value to your financial back-office by accurately collecting the right data. ICG will assist you in evaluating your vendors, incoming documents, efficiency expectations and determining what technologies your capture “portfolio” might include. You can also request a demo of one our data capture or comprehensive cloud-hosted financial back-office solutions and see for yourself how your company can take advantage of the power of AI and ICG. For a quick view of ICG’s solutions view this short video.