One of the annoying things about printed documents in this electronic age is that you have to do quite a lot of work to turn them back into machine-useable form. This is particularly true of complex documents like a company’s report and accounts.
Analysts and users of accounting information would love to get these reports in a form which makes it really easy for them to strip out the numbers that they want to examine and have these numbers dumped straight into the relevant portions of their spreadsheets. Unfortunately, until now this has involved either doing it by hand, by re-keying all the information, or, if you were senior enough, delegating it to someone else to do (with plenty of opportunity in the process for copy and transposition errors to creep in).
