Accounting and finance companies have to process lots of documents daily. These include invoices, payroll records, tax returns, bank statements and financial reports. This was and in many cases still is done with manual labor.
It’s quite obvious that this is time consuming, and costly. Yet it may be surprising, how high these costs may be.
Level 1 – Manual Data Entry by yourself
Lets start with worse case scenario – you do the manual data entry yourself in your working hours, in a time, when you could do actual accounting work.
The real cost here should be spread into few categories. First is purely financial. According to Payscale, average hourly rate for CPA (Certified Public Accountant), was $41. Bureau of Labor Statistics gives similar value of $37. Of course this may vary, depending on your experience, region and other factors. Simply ask yourself, how many hours each month do you work on such tasks, and multiply by your hourly rate – you’ll have financial cost.
But problem with manual data entry is not only that it’s expensive. It’s lso most boring, and soul-sucking part of work. It burns us out quicker, and causes more tiredness than other tasks, that are more creative.
The more we do of this sort of work, the quicker we’re discouraged from work. As we’re more tired, we also have less energy for the tasks that are really important, that are the very essence of our work. So the quality of it can also be harmed, because we’ve spend too much time on copying & pasting text to excel.
Level 2: Outsource Manual Data Entry to Other People
Lets consider a bit better scenario, which is when you simply hire someone for manual data entry. Be it an intern, or external data entry specialist. As for 2024, according to salary.com, average hourly wage for Data Entry Clerk was $18.
Big advantage of this option is that you only pay in money, and can get rid of other, non-financial costs mentioned above.
Cost is also lower than if you’d so it by yourself, as people who do this sort of work have lower hourly rate than any accountants. Definitely better option.
Level 3: Use Automation to Get Rid of Manual Data Entry
One step further is to get rid of human factor all together, and outsource it to to software instead of other person. There are specialized apps that can read input document and then produce output document from it – output containing only previously defined data. Example is bank statement converter , that can read PDF files, and then extract transactions tables from it, and put them into new CSV file.
This sort of software usually uses advanced OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technologies to read data from input document, and then process it according to it’s algorithms. Another example of usage is in fraud detection, where similar software can help recognize fake bank statements automatically.
In this case we can achieve highest efficiency on each level. It’s the cheapest option (monthly subscriptions usually start from $30, so even if you spend just 2 hours each month on this, its cheaper). It causes zero tiredness. And also it takes minutes instead of hours.
best bank statement converter easy to use advanced machine learning algorithms that work with any bank converts in seconds what human would in hours Open account to:
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