We can now make a formal statement of our policy on data entry. When we input data, we usually need to input a list of items where each has a date, a narrative and a number. We will scan in numbers from any printed matter using optical character recognition. This will normally be a system where we scan a pile of bank statements through our HP8600 printer/scanner and then process them. It could also be an LG OCR mouse scanner as a backup system, assisted by an onscreen toolkit which can process the results of the scan. The toolkit can also process spreadsheet data as occasionally supplied by clients.

 
Our standard optical character recognition software uses Able2Extract, and then it uses the running total on the bank statement to check the correctness of the scanning. If there are any errors, then it is able to correct them automatically in a number of steps, highlighting the corrections made so that a human supervisor can check them. Sometimes scanning conditions are poor, so we display the scanned results to the human operator before the correction, and we rely upon the fact that humans are good at pattern recognition, and can make changes before the running total check.

 
We now have our activities colour-coded in a distinctive way. Anything to do with VAT is green, like the old form VAT100. Payroll is yellow, like the old payslip booklet P30BC. Companies and corporation tax are blue, like the second version of the CT600 or the general colour-cast of the Companies House website. This leaves red for sole traders and sometimes gold for partnerships.