When you first start your business, form filling isn't a huge deal. Sure it's tedious, but you can handle it. Yet as you expand and your customers grow exponentially, these tasks become wildly inefficient.
Filling out any type of form can take a lot of time - time that you, your employees, and your buyers can spend doing more important and valuable tasks. Not only are they time consuming, but they're mundane, and prone to human error. In this article you'll learn how automated form filling with autofill can optimize existing operational burden.
Forms can take on many forms (pun intended!), but overall we've defined 'Form' here as any time a human is required to input data. This can be filling out medical history, submitting expense reports, filing taxes, completing an online purchase, doing invoices, and more! Keep reading to dive into some specific use cases.
Unleashing the Power of Form Automation
Autofill Form Data: The Building Blocks of Efficiency
Automated forms are the foundation of modern data management. They streamline the entire process of data extraction, data input, validation, processing, significantly reducing the resource-intensive nature of manual data entry. In friendly words: automated forms make the whole ordeal of filling out a form quicker, simpler, and without mistakes. Instead of re-entering the same information, you can pull data from an existing database.
Autofilling forms is inherently difficult - typically the information you need is hosted someplace different than the form you're filling out. A common use case is that you need to fill out third-party forms on an entirely different service or program. If this program doesn't allow autofill, you have limited ways to easily fill into the information. Form automation can work by setting up rules for each field in a form, or using AI to understand the form and all of its required components. Companies like Sleek are taking innovative approaches that might be able to suit your individual needs here.
Efficiency Across Industries: Realizing the Potential
Automated forms with an advanced autofill feature can optimize industries across the board:
Retail: Streamlining Orders with Automated Forms
Within retail, it can be complicated to manage customer orders and inventory. Automated form processing can help the creation of structured forms for orders, inventory management, and customer inquiries. With smart autofill functionalities, we see businesses handle wide-range retail processes efficiently.
Insurance: Autofill Info
Insurance companies, including car insurers, health insurers, and credit card providers, deal with massive amounts of electronic forms everyday. Direct data field inputs simplify data submission and processing, expediting claims processing, policy applications, and data extraction. A lot of insurance claims also include personal information or payment information. A form automated tool with autofill can securely enter this information from secure local storage without requiring users to rely on insecure notepads and raw text files to write down information.
Finance: Speeding Up Transactions
Complex forms are common for banks and any financial institution. Think about paperwork related to mortgage applications, loans, and credit approvals. There’s a lot of information that goes into those types of documents - and frankly, a lot of it is just repeated information that is stored someplace else. A software that understands the fields required to fill these out, can take a week-long process into just a couple of minutes with even less errors.
Construction and Home Renovation: Streamlined Project Management
Contractors within the construction industry have multiple benefits from quickly filling out forms and documents. They can use autofill to input personal and business information - like contact info, contractor licenses, etc. into the actual contracts for individual clients.
Common documents like project proposals and invoices are typically made up of repetitive data entry that is slightly tweaked to meet each client. With dedicated autofilling, contractors can fill out these documents more efficiently - freeing up multiple hours each day.
It’s not uncommon for contractors to deal with more than 10 different documents for each client. Autofill tools here bring efficiency, ultimately improving project management and client interactions.
Tax Returns Made Simple: Simplifying the Filing Process
Taxpayers can simplify the tax-filing process by securely storing their personal information, including names, addresses, Social Security Numbers, and banking details, within autofill tools or password managers. This stored data can then be seamlessly autofilled into tax forms, significantly reducing the risk of manual data entry errors. Taxpayers can also grab information from prior years' tax returns, providing a seamless transition from one tax year to the next. Tools here can also help populate data from documents like W-2 and 1099 forms.
CPAs benefit from encouraging their own clients to utilize autofill tech, so that they can accurately prepare their taxes beforehand. CPAs typically request that their clients provide complete (and accurate) information. Having them use autofill technology will help ensure that there is no missing or incorrect data.
Ultimately, autofill technology will significantly cut down the time CPAs spend on data entry and validation, and allow them to focus on tax preparation, like tax planning and advisory services.
Leveraging Autofill Features and AI-Powered Solutions
Conditional Logic: Enhancing the User Experience
Autofill software solutions open incorporate advanced AI-driven conditional logic. These can complement larger form automated services. For example, for mortgage application forms, users selecting “self-employed” could dynamically trigger displayed form fields related to self-employment income documentation. Based on the user, these fields can be populated precisely and within the actual context of the form.
Mobile Forms: Data Collection Anywhere
Typing on a tablet or a smartphone can be cumbersome - it takes longer and users are more prone to making errors. Seamless form filling on mobile drives efficiency for fieldwork, surveys, and data collection.
The best part about automated form filling that’s different than autofill as it exists today, is the ability to a add additional context. Need to pull location-based data for your current location? Easy. Do you always use a specific billing address when using a particular service? Done. Smarter automation means less thinking for you and your customers. Particularly fora mobile form, automated data entry can take your a long way.
Data Extraction: Maximizing Insights with AI-Powered Autofill
Modern form automation can even extract structured data from forms and ingress it into your preferred data management system. AI algorithms play a pivotal role in recognizing and interpreting data, making the entire process smarter.
Form Automation with Sleek: A Spotlight on Excellence
The Effectiveness of Form Automation: Key Statistics
- Error Reduction: Workflow automation software may reduce errors by 37%
- Efficiency: Workflow automation can improve business processes by 60%
- Data Automation: An estimated 69% of data processing and 64% of data-collection can be automated .
Sleek: Empowering Businesses with Form Automation and Autofill Features
Okay, you sold me. Smart autofill everywhere will save a lot of people more time. But how do I actually offer this?
Luckily, new companies like Sleek are offering custom solutions along with developer-friendly SDKs that allow existing businesses and software vendors to incorporate additional autofill features into their websites and programs. Sleek has already proven success in the retail industry where we’re making it easier for online shoppers to securely enter their payment info like credit card information or their phone number by offering one-click autofill. The goal here is to reduce toil (repetitive steps that can be automated) by meeting the user where they are, and being aware of contextual and redundant information. This can be helpful on mobile, on native applications, and on web browsers like Google Chrome and for any industry.
Reach out to Sleek at hello@onsleek.com to talk through your use cases and see if there’s a fit. Form automation tooling plus autofill are a “better together” story that can change you and your user’s entire form workflow. From data accuracy, to efficiency, to overall better user experiences, the benefits are evident.
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