We often receive requests for Data Entry services when the client can make do with Data Capturing. And often clients demand Data capturing services whereas it can be done only through Data Entry. Many of our clients use the two words interchangeably, not realizing that these are not synonymous services.There is however a minor difference in the method of the two techniques.Data Entry essentially requires a human Agent to convert the physical data into digital data. Data Capturing on the other hand doesn’t require manual effort for entering the physical data into digital.

An example of Data Entry is when a person is typing the data given in a form into an excel sheet. And an example of Data capture is the bar code sensing by laser beam at a supermarket. Another example of Data Capture is OCR – or the Optical Character Reader, which can directly scan your documents and convert them digitally as it is.

There are just minor formatting and accuracy errors which need to be manually corrected and edited. Otherwise OCR can be considered as automated data entry.But there is one limitation; OCR doesn’t work too well for handwritten notes. Because computers haven’t yet become so advanced that they can understand individual handwriting as it is.

Data Capturing works when your data is such that it has boxes for ticking or circles for filling and the data is entered in multiple choice question formats. Images or texts that appear like images can be easily stored digitally through the data capturing method by OCR. However for hand-written data, like in a descriptive form, you will have to use Data Entry services only.