2.72:Batch Processing Basics

What is Batch Processing?

A batch is the fundamental container of documents in Grooper. Batch processing is everything done to your documents from getting them into Grooper, to classifying them and getting information off them, to getting them out of Grooper. Every company and every project has their unique document processing needs. Grooper's functionality to build batch processing instructions is highly customizable and configurable to meet these needs. This article will give a broad overview of what batch processing looks like in Grooper.

Anatomy of a Batch

Before we get into processing documents, let's examine how a batch is structured in Grooper. There are three components to a batch:

1. The Batch itself
2. Batch Folders
3. Batch Pages

Below is an extremely simple Batch.  We are viewing it Grooper Dashboard, using the "Batch Viewer" tab.

At the top level is the Batch, named here "Simple Batch".	Contained inside are Batch Folders and Batch Pages.  Here, it is just a collection of .TIFF Batch Page images of invoices.	We create can create a hierarchical structure by separating pages into folders.  In the example below, one Batch Folder was created for every Batch Page.

Multiple folder levels can be created in a batch depending on how complicated your documents are.  Speaking of documents, what does Grooper consider a document in a Batch?

What is a document?

At the most basic level, a document is just a collection of pages. How these pages get grouped together is what makes them a document. A W-4 from the IRS can be identified by the form number "W-4". A contract to lease oil and gas rights is identified by the contract's content from beginning, to middle, to end. An invoice is a list of purchased items from a certain vendor. If we saw these three documents in a stack we would intuitively group the pages corresponding to each document and separate them from each other. 

IRS Form w-4	Oil and Gas Lease Agreement	Invoice

How does Grooper distinguish between individual pages and documents? Batch Pages and Batch Folders. If documents are just collections of pages, Batch Folders are the containers distinguishing one collection of pages from another. Even if the document is only one page, it will be represented in Grooper as a Batch Folder containing a single Batch Page.

But at a slightly more complicated level, documents are more than just a bunch of papers.  How they are grouped together, according to their content, is critically important to what makes one document different from another.  In Grooper, you will create a logical system to turn loose pages into organized documents and get relevant information from them.  This is done by creating a Batch Process.

Loose pages in a batch.	Organized into document folders and classified according to their content.