Data entry clerk

A data entry clerk is a member of staff who reads hand-written or printed records and types them into a computer. They are sometimes employed on a temporary basis, but most large companies which have large amounts of data will hire on a near-permanent basis. For a mailing company, data entry clerks might be required to type in reference numbers for items of mail which had failed to reach their destination. 

If the company was compiling a database from addresses handwritten on a questionnaire, the person typing those in would be a data entry clerk. In a cash office, a data entry clerk might be required to type expenses into a database using numerical codes. An example of this system would be one commonly used to document health insurance claims, such as for Medicaid in the United States.

The number of data entry clerks working with physical hand-written documents has declined in modern times other positions within a company to enter their own data as it emerges rather than have a different employee do this task full time. Instead, the documents are first scanned by an optical character recognition system to read the documents and process the data electronically. 

In some systems, the hand-written forms are first scanned into digital images that resemble PDF files. These files are then sent through the optical character recognition system, where many fields are completed by the computerized optical scanner. The data entry clerk then manually reviews the data already entered corrects it if simultaneously viewing the image on-screen.