Turnkey for the third time

The word turnkey has started to haunt me. Either that, or else an awful lot of US copywriters use it far too readily. Anyway, I came across it again today when I was looking at a site that is promoting a new system of dealing with cheques (though, of course, they spell the word, checks).

Before I talk further about that, I must mention the wonderful machines they have at the evening job I do. They’re imaging machines which are used to image all the cheques that are processed each night so that they can be worked on by the data entry people. This imaging is done at high speed – a speed so high in fact, you wonder how the machine can register anything at all. When you consider that photocopying machines these days merely blink at the thing they’re copying and it’s copied, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at the speed the cheques are copied at. But I am. I could stand and watch this amazing machine for hours.

Check Vantage is talking about a similar electronic check processing system, but one that would be available to businesses. Furthermore, this process not only images the cheques/checks, but it ‘reads’ even handwritten figures! Now, this is quite extraordinary. The humans at the place I work at have considerable trouble reading many of the cheques that pass before their eyes. I have to wonder how a machine can do it. Yet they say in their blurb: Our CAR/LAR technology actually ‘reads’ the handwritten amounts of each check, and creates a posting file to export into your billing system.’ So obviously this software can do the job. It’ll be putting all of us data entry people out of work!

Not only does it read the handwritten stuff, it images 180 items per minute. That sounds at least compatible with the machines at our place. The point of installing this sort of software, of course, is to increase the speed at which the cheques are processed. Instead of having to be handled by an accounts department, they can be virtually processed electronically from whoa to go. Scary.