Ultimate Guide to Extracting Data from Acord Forms 24: Tips & Tricks for Professionals

ACORD Forms 24 and supporting documents help insurance underwriters approve or reject property damage claims. Manual data extraction from ACORD forms hampers productivity and efficiency due to several challenges, such as time-consuming processes, high errors, reprocessing for corrections, and increased costs. 

Hence, insurance companies, financial institutions, and liability management solution providers use automated data extraction tools to process vast volumes of data with less human effort. These software solutions use intelligent document processing (IDP) technology to extract vital data from ACORD forms in minimal time accurately. 

This blog discusses the importance of data extraction from ACORD 24 forms, common challenges, preparation techniques, and a detailed step-by-step process to extract data.

What are ACORD 24 Forms? 

The Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (ACORD), a global non-profit organization, standardised templates in 1970 to access and exchange insurance data with little clarity. ACORD 24 forms (Certificate of Property Insurance) is a standardised format of property insurance issued by insurance agencies to clients as evidence of coverage for a specific property and period. 

It is a one-page document with crucial information about the policyholder, multiple insurers involved, coverage limits, and insurance expiration date. Insurance agencies and Proptech solutions extract data from ACORD 24 forms to process claims and manage property coverage. 

What Information or Data Points are Typically Extracted from ACORD 24 Forms? 

Data extraction from ACORD 24 forms provides the following data points: 

• Policyholder Information: Policyholder's name, address, email address and phone number 
• Coverage Details: Maximum amount the insurance agency will be paying for damages and the type of coverage details
• Property Information: Number of properties, names, and respective addresses
• Risk Information: Details of property’s risk factors such as floods, hurricanes, wildfires, extreme heat, and storms
• Agent/Broker Information: Broker’s name and the respective insurance agency details, including name, address, and phone number

Understanding The Importance of Data Extraction from ACORD Forms 24

Here's why data extraction from ACORD forms is crucial for insurance industries: 

a. Reducing human errors

ACORD 24 forms data extraction and reduces human errors as the data extracted undergoes robust validation processes. Reviewing the data and finding exceptions and errors ensures accurate calculation of the claim amount.

b. Informed decision-making

Data extraction from ACORD 24 forms provides crucial information that helps businesses finalize claim approvals. Details such as insurers' data, property, and coverage information make it easy for liability management solution providers to integrate them directly into databases for business operations. 

c. Compliance

A standardized data extraction process ensures businesses adhere to standard security protocols and industry-specific data protection laws and regulations. 

d. Auditing

Data extraction from ACORD forms equals performing a data audit for insurance businesses. It helps to identify data sources, analyse security measures and access controls, and redefine data retention strategies. 

e. Customer service

Automated data extraction from ACORD 24 forms improves your business's efficiency by 10X, as the software solution captures data in less than 30 seconds. This lets employees serve customers better by processing claims and promptly responding to their queries. 

8 Common Challenges in Data Extraction from ACORD 24 Forms

Some of the common challenges that businesses face while extracting data from ACORD 24 forms: 

1. Complex document layouts

ACORD 24 forms have complex layouts with tables, paragraphs, and key-value pairs on a single page, making manual extraction difficult. Moreover, essential OCR technology software solutions may need to be more reliable, as employees must create templates for varying layouts.

2. Fraud detection 

Insurance companies are susceptible to fraud, as people exaggerate and falsify information to increase a claim's value and gain a financial advantage. The Coalition Against Insurance Fraud shows that insurance fraud in the United States amounts to USD 308.6 billion annually. 

Hence, businesses face difficulties detecting fake insurance forms, as only 10% of document fraud is visible to the human eye, according to Inscribe’s 2023 report. Fraud detection in such cases demands using advanced machine learning algorithms to spot nuanced manipulation such as blurred texts, low-resolution images, and formatting changes. 

3. Data Accuracy

Abbyy's 2022 report shows that insurers face difficulty in accessing information from documents, causing nearly 35% of the extracted data to be erroneous. Manual data extraction is prone to errors due to monotonous workflow and enormous amounts of documents. 

Hence, data accuracy becomes an essential challenge for insurers. Accurate or complete data may lead to incorrect claims processing, financial losses, and regulatory issues.

4. Integration with existing insurance systems

Insurance agencies and liability management solution providers use different systems and databases that accept only a specific format of extracted data. 

Another complex business process is extracting information from multiple sources and integrating it with systems for seamless data transfer. 

5. Increased costs 

Hiring employees on an hourly basis for data extraction is a cost-effective option in the beginning. However, as the business grows and document volume increases, the manual extraction cost increases, again a challenge.

6. Security and Compliance

According to the Identity Theft Resource Center’s 2023 data breach report, data compromises in 2023 increased by 78% compared to 2022. Moreover, the financial industry is the second-highest sector affected by data breaches. 

Security challenges for insurance companies and compliance providers increase as manual data extraction involves a diverse workforce, which can lead to data theft and misuse. Nevertheless, automating data extraction is risky if the software doesn't follow standard security protocols. 

7. Scalability

As the data volume increases, processing claims slows down as manual data extraction takes nearly 15-20 minutes. The same Abbyy survey shows that more than 69% of insurers spend 8 hours each week trying to locate and process data in insurance documents. 

Extracting insurer details, policy expiration date, and coverage limits from ACORD forms at scale, cross-verifying the data, and entering them into the database increases time and costs and decreases the efficiency by 10X for businesses. 

8. Adapting to languages

Software solutions with basic OCR technology have limited languages and require training to extract data from different ACORD 24 forms in other languages. Again, this process demands effort and time from employees, which does not allow businesses to redirect them to strategic tasks. 

Preparing ACORD Forms 24 for Data Extraction

Some practical tips to prepare ACORD 24 forms for seamless data extraction: 

a. Standardizing form submission

Document standardisation maintains a consistent format of documents that allows users to access data effortlessly. For example, keep a single format of ACORD 24 forms from PDFs, fillable forms, and e-forms and encourage employees to use the same format with clients. This makes it easy for both employees and software solutions to extract data. 

b. Scan physical documents

If your business has physical copies of ACORD 24 forms, scan them using a high-resolution scanner to produce quality documents. Store the PDFs in a single folder to easily ingest them into the data extraction software. 

c. Pre-processing checks for completion

Completing data annotation and labelling processes, such as image classification, text annotation, object detection, and segmentation, will help AI and ML models easily extract data.

d. Data cleansing

Data cleansing is crucial, as scanned documents contain noise and skew. It enhances the data present in ACORD forms. First, correct the skew in the elements and images by rotating the document clockwise or anticlockwise. 

Second, noise from documents such as blur, unwanted elements, black dots, wrinkles, dirt, and stains is removed. Then, the contrast and density of documents are adjusted to make the data clearer for OCR technology to read. 

e. Template creation

If you're using a traditional OCR technology software solution, you must create templates for ACORD 24 forms. These templates set the rules for the OCR technology and show where to look and extract data. Create the necessary templates before capturing data seamlessly to change layouts, languages, and formatting.

Step-by-Step Guide to Data Extraction from ACORD 24 Forms

ACORD 24 data extraction begins with choosing the right tool for your business needs. Most software solutions use standalone OCR technology to extract data. 

However, this technology cannot adapt to variations in layouts and formatting, resulting in a low accuracy rate when extracting data from complex documents with tables. 

Moreover, employees must create templates with rules for the OCR technology to extract data from changing formats.

Advanced and top data extraction solutions like Docsumo employ OCR technology with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to extract data from documents irrespective of their templates, formats, and layouts. The tool learns and adapts to varying layouts and extracts data with a high accuracy rate. 

Hence, after considering the technology requirements, other factors such as pricing, features, security, compliance, scalability, and adaptability should be regarded as to finalize the best automated data extraction software solution. 

Here, we’ll use Docsumo as an example and see how it streamlines the insurance document processing workflow.

1. Sign up on the Docsumo platform

Visit Docsumo’s website and sign up for a free trial by entering your name, phone number, and work email address. Set a strong password, and you can now process 100 ACORD forms for free. 

2. Upload documents

Go to ‘Document Type’ and choose ‘ACORD Forms.’ You can upload documents from your system or use Docsumo's auto-import feature to ingest ACORD forms from your emails automatically. 

3. Data extraction and validation 

Docsumo preprocesses the documents to remove skew and noise and automatically corrects the contrast and density to clarify the data. 

After completing pre-processing techniques, its pre-trained API models automatically extract data from ACORD 24 forms. First, it extracts key-value pairs, a set of two data items from these documents. The most common key-value pairs for ACORD 24 forms are 

• Policyholder name
• Policyholder email address 
• Property name
• Property address 
• Policy number 
• Insurers details 

Docsumo then uses neural networks and machine learning algorithms to extract data from complex areas such as tables and paragraphs. It then validates the extracted data to detect errors, mismatched entries, and inconsistencies. 

4. Customizing extraction settings

While Docsumo extracts data from respective documents without human intervention, you can customize and edit the fields according to your requirements. You can add or delete fields; the tool will follow the same process for new documents. 

5. Reviewing extracted data

After data extraction, review each field and verify the data manually to train the system to extract data with a higher accuracy rate. In case of corrections, edit the fields and click ‘Approve’ to save the extracted data. 

6. Download the extracted data 

Download the extracted data in PDF, JSON, and Excel formats according to the purpose. Excel format helps with claim amount calculations, and JSON format integrates with your existing databases. 

7. Automating data extraction for large document sets

After understanding how the tool works, you can process ACORD forms in batches. For businesses, batch processing documents using Docsumo comes as a savior because of benefits such as:

• Processing ACORD forms in 30-60 seconds
• A 99%+ accuracy rate 
• A 95% straight-through processing time
• Improved efficiency by 10X 
• Reduced operational costs by 60-70% 

For example, GetJones faced challenges processing vast volumes of ACORD forms and unstructured lease contracts. Docsumo’s intelligent automation now processes thousands of ACORD forms daily and extracts data with more than 99% accuracy. 

Suggested reads: How Jones streamline Certificate of Insurance automation using Docsumo?

8. Integration to Workflow

Integrate the extracted data with your industry-specific CRMs, ERPs, and other software applications for seamless data flow. 

Best Practices for Managing Extracted Data from ACORD Forms 24

Here are some best practices to manage extracted data safely and maintain efficiency: 

a. Data validation

Using an automated data capture solution doesn't require reprocessing, as the software validates extracted data against existing databases and sends it to the respective personnel for final review. 

In manual data extraction, cross-verify the data with available data and check for errors and inconsistencies. If errors occur, reprocess the documents, complete the review, and download the extracted data. 

b. Secure storage

Store documents digitally on cloud servers and password-protect essential files to prevent data leakages. Save copies in your local computer, external hard drives, and physical documents to access the data even during data breaches. 

c. Integration settings 

Set up primary and advanced integrations and consolidate data from disparate sources into a single database to transfer data seamlessly. 

d. Awareness training 

Verizon’s 2023 data breach report shows that 74% of data breaches involved human elements, such as social engineering attacks and inducing employees to click on malware links unintentionally. 

This highlights that businesses should train and create awareness among employees to avoid cyber and malware attacks. 

e. Regular audits

Review extracted data regularly and delete files of poor quality that are no longer useful for business operations. 

f. Access controls and permissions

Control who can access data and encrypt classified documents to prevent unauthorized use. Implement multi-factor authentication and give data access based on an employee's requirement to use the data for decision-making processes. 

Enhancing Insurance Operational Efficiency with ACORD Forms 24 Data Extraction 

Effective data extraction from ACORD 24 forms using automation removes data challenges such as errors, interoperability, adapting to languages and layouts, and increased time and costs. Docsumo is the perfect solution for businesses processing vast volumes of insurance documents. 

Docsumo can extract data from 24 ACORD forms and other supporting documents in less than 30 seconds with 100% automation. The best part? Extracted data undergoes automatic validation, increasing the accuracy rate to 99%+. 

Your employees can then review errors and exceptions to integrate them into the existing database. 

The result? Improve your business’s efficiency by 10X and process claims in real time to better serve customers. Sign up for a free trial of Docsumo and start processing ACORD 24 forms with a 95%+ straight-through processing time. 

FAQs

1. How can I ensure the accuracy of the data extracted from ACORD Forms 24?

Investing in an automated solution like Docsumo for data extraction guarantees a 99% accuracy rate. The software automatically validates the extracted data against available databases.

2. Can I directly integrate extracted data from ACORD Forms 24 into my existing database or CRM system?

Yes. After data extraction, convert extracted data to a standardized format such as Excel or JSON. Then, integrate it into existing databases, CRMs, ERPs, and other applications.

3. What measures should be taken to ensure the privacy and security of the data extracted from ACORD Forms 24?

Provide access to extracted data only to people who need it. For example, share the data only with underwriters, as they approve or reject claims based on it. Avoid sharing it with everyone to prevent data leakages and enforce using strong passwords.  

4. Can I process multiple ACORD 24 forms at once?

Yes, Docsumo allows businesses to process vast volumes of documents at once. Ingest multiple ACORD 24 forms, and the software extracts data from all of them simultaneously.

5. What are the benefits of using automation for ACORD 24 forms data extraction? 

The benefits of using automation for extracting data from ACORD 24 forms include reduced errors, operational costs, and processing time, as well as increased efficiency, security, and productivity.