Office Forms - Enterprise by Toplevel Computing

Few things beat the tedium of rekeying data from a pile of completed customer surveys or order forms. So why wear out your fingers or waste your sales support resource when you can transfer data from electronic forms at the touch of a button?

Toplevel Computing's OfficeForms Enterprise is a new electronic forms solution which aims to take the leg (or rather finger) work out of capturing completed forms. It is ideally suited to businesses wishing to send out electronic forms to companies or individuals via email or the Web, although forms can be sent out on floppy disk to those without either.

Says Toplevel Marketing Director, Jane Roberts, "We're moving into an electronic age. We're already at the point where take up of email and the Web is such that it's now possible to communicate with the outside world in this way. Electronic forms present your company as modern but most of all they save you money."

Toplevel's British-made software solution has attracted a lot of attention in the USA, where eight major US government customers are currently beta-testing the product. One of them will be using the solution 'live' from the 1st December. "Paper forms were costing this particular Government department customer $7.50 each to process," explains Roberts. "They estimate electronic forms will cost them $1.50 each, a saving of 80%. Their estimates for their 'Year 98' are that 10% of a total of four million forms will be returned electronically, so that's a pretty big saving over the year."

Toplevel's initial market research shows that the majority of forms generated by business are enquiries, order forms and surveys; the kind of data capture much in demand by sales forces and marketing departments. Roberts points to the cost benefits of switching to electronic data capture: "The cost of processing paper is huge," she says. "Paper forms must be printed, posted and then, after they are returned, they have to be either scanned in and mis-scans corrected manually or entirely keyed manually. Up until now there have been technical difficulties with non-distributable forms, but we've overcome these difficulties."

Toplevel's solution allows guided data entry on all forms and includes a Filling Assistant to give users advice on what they need to put. OfficeForms Enterprise Web plug-in technology means it's possible to publish large complex forms on the Internet because form data can be saved locally so that users don't have to complete and return forms in one go but can keep adding to them over several days.

The Toplevel Web Forms Designer is available to purchase for #499. Bespoke OfficeForms packages are available at individually quoted prices, dependent on the size and complexity of the forms required. For more information contact Toplevel Computing on 01453 753955.