Welcome to the documentation of the FormXtract API. This guide will help you implement FormXtract within your business to process forms faster.
What Is FormXtract
Quik! FormXtract is an API-based data extraction solution for forms, applications and structured documents.
The FormXtract API takes in a completed form, extracts the data from the fields on the form, and returns that data via API in a context-rich and highly accurate (99.9%) manner.
Customers use FormXtract to streamline and fully automate their forms processing steps within their business processes.
Any static form can be used with FormXtract.
A “static” form is a document whose design does not change each time it is used. Unlike “dynamic” documents (such as contracts) where paragraphs, text and objects might be added to the document based on the user inputs, a static document retains it’s size, field placement and design as it is used.
Goal and Purpose
Many business processes depend on forms being filled out in order to capture information. The question is, what happens next; what happens to that filled out form?
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Eliminate Work For Your Team
Quik! sets up your documents for you - other than sending Quik! your forms, nobody on your team has to draw bounding boxes, define labels or anything else typically associated with data extraction tools.
FormXtract can reduce data entry and verification tasks by 90-99%, depending on the quality of your documents. By using FormXtract your errors will truly become exceptions to the rule and require far less effort for your team to validate.
Enable 99.9% Accuracy
Data from FormXtract is already verified by humans (when necessary) which means the data is ready to insert into your system.
Cleaner data going into your system results in little to no additional work needed on that data within your systems.
Increase Data Capture
Capture more data points with Quik!. Every field that Quik! defines on a form will be returned by FormXtract. This results in more data becoming available to your system without any human intervention.
Process any or ALL of your forms, not just the most valuable ones. Because Quik! sets up your forms for you in 10 days or less, you can add any form into the FormXtract process easily and quickly.
Eliminate Backlogs
Eliminate batch runs and scheduling jobs to handle your incoming documents. Instead, send them to FormXtract 24-hours per day, as they come in to your system. If you already automated capturing your documents electronically then you send them to the FormXtract API as a step in your workflow. There’s no longer a need to batch documents together and wait for a processing window.
Process spikes in forms volume with ease. FormXtract has a service level agreement (SLA) to return data on submitted forms within a specific time period. Whether that means one document or a huge volume of documents, FormXtract will get the job done within the timeframe specified in your SLA.
Overview of How FormXtract Works
FormXtract is an API-based solution for extracting data off of completed forms. The process includes AI-driven solutions for reading the data off the form and humans to validate, verify or reject data that the machine gave a low-confidence score to. The resulting data is up to 99.9% accurate and context-rich so the customer’s system can ingest the data and perform work without involving any humans in the process.
The animation below shows how FormXtract takes in a submitted form and then reads each of the fields off the form to extract not only the name and value of the field, but additional meta data that can be used to display the data, make business decisions and more.
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FormXtract Steps
A customer’s user or client fills out a form and submits it back to the customer for processing.
The customer’s processing system takes the electronic copy of the submitted form (or scans it to TIF or PDF) and submits it to the FormXtract API.
FormXtract then matches the submitted document to the Quik! Forms Library to determine the company, form, page and fields to extract.
The data is then passed through several AI-driven processes to read the data.
Every character read is given a confidence score and when that score is too low, the data is then verified, edited or rejected by humans to ensure 99.9% accuracy
The extracted data is stored in the Quik! Vault, a hyper-secure storage mechanism.
A webhook then notifies the customer system that their submitted document has been processed.
The customer calls another FormXtract API to download the extracted data to then transform and use within the customer’s systems.
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Accuracy in FormXtract
While FormXtract enables 99.9% accuracy, no system can be 100% perfect. There can always be some amount of rejected forms and/or fields if the submitted document is of poor quality.
Rejections happen primarily due to illegible handwriting that no human can read, or when the form is not filled out well (e.g. data is in the wrong place, data is missing, pages are missing, etc.).
The output form FormXtract will provide information that will aid in determining if a form or a specific field was unverified and should be handled manually.
How To Achieve More Accurate Results
The best way to ensure 99.9%+ accuracy is to have forms filled out with a computer so the data is typed and not handwritten. In addition to doing as much of the form filling work electronically, here are some best practices:
FormXtract Best Practices
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The fastest results come from electronic documents that have digital fields on them (i.e. a PDF with editable fields).
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The second fastest results come from electronic documents that were completed entirely online, in a digital format.
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Scans, faxes and lower-quality versions of the original document may slow down processing.
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Separate your forms into individual documents to be sent to FormXtract, one at a time. Although FormXtract can handle a single file (TIF or PDF) that includes multiple documents, if a document contains more than one copy of the same form, the resulting data can be difficult to match up to the documents.
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FormXtract can read handwriting, but handwriting so bad that no human can read it will result in errors or bad results in the extracted data.
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