Barcodes; they're not just for the grocery store.
You probably don’t think about it too often, but barcodes are all around us. Movie tickets. Grocery store items. Shipping labels. Train and airplane boarding passes. Even on some hospital bands and medication containers. They come in all shapes and sizes — forming an intersection between physical objects (products and documents) and digital systems. Barcodes save all manner of industries untold sums of time and money a year in manual labor and administrative costs. With this being said, the application of bar codes goes far beyond how they are commonly perceived. Let’s take a look at two barcode uses that you may not before have considered.
Human Resources Employee Records Capture and Processing
Any HR specialist can attest to the headache that new employee onboarding can be. Beyond company-specific employee documents, there are a wide variety of tax documents, insurance forms, and financial documents that need to be processed — all that correspond to a single individual. Barcode technology can make this process much more efficient and accurate. Using specialized barcoded cover sheets, the HR specialist can scan, categorize, and file every employee record in a very organized manner that holds up to HIPAA-compliant security standards.
Barcodes for Accounts Payable Information: Vendor Invoices and More
If you thought keeping track of your expenses was a challenging endeavor, imagine keeping track of the bills of a large company. Making sure that all of the proper invoices are either generated or processed, reviewed and paid frequently requires its own department within an organization. If the process runs behind, bills can run past due, resulting in costly late fees. To accurately and efficiently process these bills, barcoded coversheets can be utilized. Automatically generated barcodes can alert a more extensive billing system of what statements have arrived, the necessary details, and the next steps in their processing journey.
The Possibilities Are Endless
One of the most difficult aspects of modern business is managing the flow and processing of physical products or documents with a digital system. In most of these instances, barcode technology can be utilized to make the translation from tangible to the digital virtually seamless.
