Cheap and powerful data entry with an App

Mar 2020

If your business involves data entry you may have struggled with illegible paper forms or badly-formatted Excel spreadsheets. But it doesn’t have to be like this….Our client has a number of staff collecting basic information about customers on paper forms. There is no wifi or reliable data connection available at the time, and the net result is that large numbers of poorly-written paper forms are being generated.

These forms then get piled up and handed over to a number of different free-lance data entry people who each produce slightly different spreadsheets containing the information. The spreadsheets are then sent by email back to head office where the data is entered into the main database. At this point basic errors like invalid email addresses are picked up, but by now it’s too late to have another look at the paper form and re-type them and the data is lost.

We proposed a solution whereby the staff who collect the information would use a low-cost tablet to allow them to type in the data in-between clients and ensure that data is validated and entered within 10 minutes of the client contact.

Then when the staff get back to the office later in the day the app syncs automatically with the server, updating and inserting the data.

This cuts out a whole layer of work involved in the data entry, improves the quality of the data and the timeliness of its entry into the database.

Have you thought about how putting mobile devices in your field staff’s hands could save you time and money? We’d be happy to talk through with you ways that we could work with you to achieve this. Drop us a line and let us know.