Although FormXtract is a very straight-forward API, there are some best practices to consider following when using this Quik! product.

Recommended Best Practices

Use Revision Dates and Literature Numbers

A best practice when designing forms is to use your own internal number or code to identify your document (we refer to it as a Literature Number or Lit No) and the date when your form was last revised (we call it Revision Date). These values are not only useful to your own team to know which form version is being used but also very helpful to FormXtract to identify the correct form that has been submitted. While these values are not required in order to process forms, it is a best practice and will help ensure the right outcome when extracting data.

Avoid Sending Duplicate Forms Together

When FormXtract reads over a document and extracts data, the data is aligned to a Quik! FormID (a unique identifier for the form in the Quik! library), a PageID (the unique ID for the page within the entire library) and a Field ID (a unique field ID for that field within the entire library). When FormXtract encounters a duplicate form in the same submitted document, the FormID, PageID and FieldID will be duplicated in the output.

In other words, the resulting data will have two instances of the same field with two different values but with no way to identify which page number within the submitted document the data belongs to.

For Example: Let’s say two accounts are opened together in a household where one account has two transfer forms and one account only has one transfer form, plus two new account forms. If these documents are all submitted together FormXtract will have 2 copies of all the new account fields and 3 copies of all the transfer fields, and it will not be obvious as to which transfer forms go with which accounts.

RECOMMENDATION: Quik! recommends sending each form as a separate API submission to FormXtract.

Do Not Batch or Delay

Although it is common to put work items into batches or delay working on them until a specific time of day when a person can address those items, FormXtract does not require batching or delaying. In fact, doing so will just cause delays for when your documents are done. Plus, FormXtract is running all the time and putting items into a batch to send all at once to Quik! will cause the FormXtract API to experience a spike and high volume, which is less than optimal for both yours and our system.

RECOMMENDATION: Quik! recommends sending documents to FormXtract as they enter your workflow and without delay.

Submit Only The Pages You Need Processed

FormXtract costs are based on the pages you send to the API to process. Submitting a blank page or including documents that FormXtract cannot recognize (e.g. a scanned copy of a driver’s license or estate plan, etc.) will result in page processing costs with no resulting fields. When possible, only send the forms that are in the Quik! Library to FormXtract for processing. Be aware that excluding pages from matching forms may result in warning messages indicating that pages are missing, but those warnings could be safely ignored if you know the pages are blank.

RECOMMENDATION: Only send relevant documents and pages to FormXtract for processing.

Include Your Document ID

When submitting documents to FormXtract there is a parameter for your own internal document ID (DocumentUNID) and a document order number (DocumentOrder). Use these values to track your document ID in the FormXtract output, especially when you split your document into separate forms to submit to FormXtract. That way you can reassemble all the FormXtract transactions to align with your transaction that included multiple documents.

Example: Your document has two forms in it (e.g. new account form, transfer form). You break your document into two separate PDFs that are submitted to FormXtract. You’ll send the same DocumentUNID and set the DocumentOrder as 1 for the first document and 2 for the second document.

RECOMMENDATION: Set the DocumentUNID to your internal document ID and set the DocumentOrder whenever you have multiple transactions for the same DocumentUNID.

Map To The Quik! Field Definition, Not The Form

The output from FormXtract is based on the Quik! Field Definition and it’s organized field naming conventions. The primary concept of our field definition is to enable you to map fields once across the definition instead of form by form.

For example, the account owner’s first name is always defined as the field 1own.FName on every form that asks for the first name of the primary account owner. Thus you only need to map to 1own.FName as there will be no difference in field names between the forms.

Of course, there is always a time when a field is highly specific to a form and does require that you understand the specific form nuances. Yet, 90% of the field mapping is standard and generic and it’s best to build your data transformation on the overall definition first.

RECOMMENDATION: Use the Quik! Field Definition to transform the FormXtract data output to your fields.

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 for Accuracy

1. The fastest results come from electronic documents that have digital fields on them (i.e. a PDF with editable fields).

2. The second fastest results come from electronic documents that were completed entirely online, in a digital format.

3. Scans, faxes and lower-quality versions of the original document may slow down processing.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. FormXtract will attempt to fix poorly scanned documents that are skewed or rotated but such documents may lead to more errors or bad results in the extracted data.