Central Statistics Office
Automating the collection of information from store receipts
The Challenge
The Household Budget Survey (HBS) is among the largest and most important of the data collection programmes which the Central Statistics Office in Ireland carries out. Every five years a random sample of 10,000 households are polled about their expenditure patterns. The aim is to determine in detail the pattern of household expenditure in order to update the Consumer Price Index.
Inpute was tasked with devising a system which would automate and streamline the processing of 100,000 pieces of highly varied, unformatted data and deliver substantial cost and resource savings.
“A solution which could deal with the unstructured nature of the till receipts seemed highly unlikely,” says John O’Reilly. “They proposed the introduction of software with advanced character recognition capabilities, designed to transform information from unstructured documents, such as receipts, into machine readable data.”
The Benefit
- The solution has streamlined the survey processing operation.
- The recognition capabilities of the solution meant that the resources needed to process the survey were significantly reduced.
- The intelligent capture solution seamlessly integrates with the existing form recognition software which would continue to capture diary data. These twin data sets – receipts and diaries – were linked and directly traceable to the source documents.
- “The project was delivered on time and within budget,” says John O’Reilly. “The capabilities of the software coupled with the edits and checks which Inpute built into the system have contributed to the overall HBS data quality. The system is now more flexible and robust.”
“Inpute’s solution has transformed our data processing operation for the better. We were impressed with the quality of the product and the support provided by the Inpute team.”