Today’s utilities are being asked to do more with less and do it faster and cheaper. When you’re dealing with data, it can be time consuming and costly to handle data entry manually. And as utilities’ data volume continues to grow, manual data processing becomes even less manageable.

Manual data entry carries significant business costs. Teams in finance, operations, logistics, and administration can spend a large percentage of their day laboriously entering information. This can be a significant cost once you factor in time for data processing, routing, and rework. Even experienced employees make mistakes, creating downstream problems that slow reporting and delay decision-making. Even a small consistent error rate can compound quickly across hundreds or thousands of invoices a year.

On top of that, repetitive data entry reduces job satisfaction, preventing employees from focusing on tasks that drive real value for your organization. A small daily task grows into a more time-consuming part of their workweek. Employees doing this work would rather spend their time on exceptions, analysis, and building vendor relationships than retyping the same data into the same field, invoice after invoice.

This is all further compounded as everyone is asked to do more with less. With workforce shortages, retirements in back-office roles, and the need to operate more efficiently, employees are often focused on completing essential tasks while more strategic analysis and higher-value work is deferred.

Utilities can save significant time and money by embracing automation. Automated data entry streamlines processes, reduces human error, enhances accuracy, improves data consistency, and increases productivity. Automation is not about replacing people but rather helps workers focus on more strategic tasks and projects, engage in better decision-making, and devote more time to high-value assignments.

One of the primary benefits of touchless data entry systems is the significant improvement in accuracy. Humans can make mistakes when entering data, especially when processing large amounts of data. Simple mistakes such as typos or misinterpreting data can be costly. With automated data entry, the likelihood of such mistakes is drastically reduced. Intelligent document systems can extract information from documents, invoices, forms, and even handwritten text with excellent accuracy, meaning businesses have accurate data available every time.

Another crucial advantage of switching to automated data entry is the efficiency and speed it brings to your utility’s operations. Manual data entry has never been easy for employees but can be especially painful when there are large sets of data to enter. Employees can spend hours, or even days, simply entering data. Automated systems can process data at a much faster rate, eliminating the need for manual input and reducing the overall time spent on this task. Inputting data is highly repeatable and mundane, so automation can free up time and allow employees to engage in more valuable, strategic work.

Switching to automated data entry systems can result in significant cost savings. Utilities that use automation are less dependent on data entry by manual labor, which reduces operational costs and helps utilities direct their efforts and funds into more productive, profitable areas.

An impactful example of automated data entry is accounts payable document processing. Automatic accounts payable invoice entry is no longer waiting in the future—utilities are already using it. The technology powering this shift is intelligent document processing, and it’s transforming how invoices flow from inbox to entry.

Prior generations of automation required creating a template for each individual style of invoice for each vendor—so it knew where specifically on the page to look for information. This was easily broken if a vendor changed its invoice format. This also relied heavily on optical character recognition, a system that reads and translates text from images or scans, which often causes letters that look similar to be incorrect.

Intelligent document processing is an artificial intelligence-powered, template-free, optical character recognition solution that enables straight-through processing in a paper-driven environment. This accounts payable solution automates the extraction, validation, and processing of various documents received as email attachments. The solution uses AI and machine learning to understand and interpret documents. This solution reduces data entry by creating an invoice with prefilled values to reduce errors and time spent on data entry. The primary goal is to ensure a vast majority of invoices remain touchless, saving your finance team time and headaches. Intelligent document processing can also speed up the invoice processing cycle and reduce payment processing times.

When implementing automated data entry systems like intelligent document processing, it is important to:

• Establish high-level goals of how touchless you want your process to be.
• Be open to processing changes that may help you gain additional efficiencies and achieve your goals.
• Determine a document sample from your top 50 use cases. This helps ensure you get immediate value from your implementation.
• Learn to identify relevant data on your documents and maintain cross-references in your existing systems.
• Allocate adequate time to learn, test, and validate the system functions correctly to meet your expectations. This includes investing time up front the first few times a document type is processed to gain efficiency overall.

Ultimately, implementing automated data entry is a win for utilities and employees. The future of data processing is here—embrace automation, reduce repetitive tasks, speed up data processing, reduce manual data entry, cut down costs, and let employees focus on more valuable work with automated data entry.

This doesn’t require a wholesale change overnight. Utilities can start small by automating one high-volume process and building from there. This momentum easily carries into other areas of the organization. The result is the same promise you started with: doing more, with the same team, in less time.