By Joe Labbe – With all the hype around robotic process automation (RPA), it can be helpful to remember that the vast majority of the data running through RPA automations originates or terminates with a document. In fact, I’d estimate that about 80% of RPA automations fall into this category.

Because so many RPA automations involve documents, we’re able to identify common document processing patterns and use cases. Here are the five most common ways companies are using RPA to enhance document processing:

Transactional data entry is the mother of all unattended bot automations.

Unattended bots do not run on a user’s personal workstation. Rather, they run on one or more physical or virtual machines tasked with performing more batch-oriented and longer running transactions. Unattended bots are custom-made to process documents that flow into the enterprise on their own timetable, and where timely and hyper-accurate data entry into downstream line of business systems is critical.

We are talking about an organization’s most important operational documents such as invoices, insurance claims, electronic medical records, shipping documents, etc. This is the data lifeblood that courses through the veins of every organization. No matter the document, the processing pattern is often the same:

• Documents are acquired and ingested.
• OCR and machine learning auto-categorize documents and extract transactional data.
• Extracted data is validated against internal data sources.
• Validated data is automatically entered into downstream line of business systems via the application’s user interface (just like the user does it).
• Real-time prompts are generated and presented to skilled knowledge workers to handle exceptions.
• Transactions are recorded and logged for audit and compliance purposes.

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