Paper Form Capture

Keep the paper. Lose the re-keying.

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Data capture

Some work will always start on paper — a customer who signs a printed form, a site with no phone allowed, a team that has used the same sheet for years. Paper Form Capture lets the paper stay. Your team photographs the filled-in pages and the phone reads them back into the digital form using OCR (optical character recognition) that runs on the phone itself — so it works offline, with no signal and nothing uploaded. Every answer stays editable, anything uncertain is marked for a person to check, and the photographed pages are kept with the submission.

How it works

The whole workflow, step by step

Each column is who does the step. Follow the numbers down the page; where the line bends, the work changes hands.

  1. 1

    Give the form a paper version

    Two ways, chosen per form in the form builder.

    APrint it from Raios360

    A PDF with corner marks, a QR code on every page, boxes for each character, checkboxes and table grids. The layout is generated with it.

    BUse the paper form you already have

    Upload a photo of the blank form. Raios360 suggests a box for each field and you adjust them in the editor.

  2. 2

    Field team

    The paper is filled in by hand

    By the customer, the worker, or both — exactly as it is today. No phone needed at this point.

  3. 3

    Field team

    Photograph the pages

    Pages are captured automatically and identified by their QR code or by matching the blank page, in any order.

  4. 4

    Field team

    On-device OCR reads them — offline

    Optical character recognition runs on the phone itself, so it needs no signal and uploads nothing. The answers land in the digital form.

  5. 5

    Field team

    A person confirms every answer

    Each field is marked with where it came from. Answers the user already typed are never overwritten.

    From paper · p.2

    Read from the page and shown with its page number.

    Check this

    Anything uncertain is flagged for the user to look at before submitting.

  6. 6

    Raios360

    The record keeps its original

    The page photos are saved with the submission. When the phone is back online, answers marked “Check this” are read again by the cloud as suggestions.

The problem it removes

  • Paper forms are typed up again at the office, days later, by someone who was not there
  • Re-keying introduces errors nobody can trace back to the original sheet
  • The paper original is filed separately from the record, or lost
  • Customers and partners still expect to sign and fill a printed form

Worth knowing

  • Turn an existing paper form into digital fields: photograph its pages, review what was read, and the fields land in the builder for you to check before saving
  • Print blank pages of your own paper form at its real paper size
  • Add formats for printed codes, cross-field arithmetic and min/max checks to the paper layout
  • Works fully offline on Android and iPhone: the OCR runs on the phone, so a site with no signal is not a problem
  • The office can also fill a form from uploaded page photos on the web, where the pages are read by a cloud model

What it installs

Ordinary pieces, already wired together

Everything below is a normal part of Raios360 — open it, edit it, and build on it like anything you made yourself.

Paper Form Capture

In the form builder

  • Paper version (print or your own form)
  • Import fields from a paper form

On the phone

  • Fill from paper, with on-device OCR that works offline
  • “Paper original” photos on the submission

On the web

  • Upload page photos to fill a form
  • A Paper Form Capture menu listing every form with a paper version

What it does not do

  • It does not submit anything on its own — a person reviews the answers and submits
  • Free handwriting is the hardest case; expect more “Check this” marks on it than on boxed characters
  • It is switched on per organization by our team rather than self-installed

Often used in

Field ServicesHealthcareLocal GovernmentAgriculture

Ready to run Paper Form Capture on your own data?

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