In this blog, I covered the typical data entry scam, and in this one, I covered the only true data entry company I know of on the Internet. But all of this begs the question: Why are data entry jobs so scarce? It seems like a real job. It seems like it would be pretty easy to do. Why is there such a dearth of legitimate data entry companies?
Well, you have to look at what data entry truly is. When someone is a typist, they are taking information that is in another form and putting it into a Word document (or whatever word processing program they are using.) In an office, the boss can hand you a stack of papers that need to be entered into the computer. That’s great, except to do this from home, the office would have to FedEx those papers to the people working at home, and by time they paid the shipping costs, paid someone to put those shipments together, and paid the typist to type it all, it would be incredibly expensive to go this route. This is an obvious no go.
What about faxing the documents over? I can’t say this has never happened, but I can say with reasonable certainty that it’s pretty darn rare. By the time the person sat there and faxed all of the documents over, waited for the work to be done and have it come back, they could have easily just done it themselves with less effort. At least this option isn’t prohibitively expensive, but I really just don’t see it happening anytime soon. Also, the quality of the transmission is never very good with faxing, which means there is a higher chance of the typist misreading the document. Never a good thing.
What about scanning the documents, emailing them to the typists, and having them type them and email them back? This is actually the way that Key For Cash functions, and they seem to do okay with that, although they don’t seem to have enough work for all of their typists for most of the year. This is also the route that the coders go, although obviously a medical or legal coder is doing more than just typing up a document. I am doing a series on coding next week, and I’ll explain more about the coding industry then. But suffice it to say, they are far from simple typists. Overall though, the same thought process goes for this as with faxing: It’s almost easier to just do it yourself.
What if the information wasn’t in paper form but instead in audio form? Well, then you have the field of transcription, which is also much more than just typing. I have worked as a general transcriptionist and studied to become a medical transcriptionist for a year and a half–to say that transcriptionists “just type what they hear” is a gross understatement. There is a lot of training that goes into becoming a medical transcriptionist, because you have to train your ear to hear things correctly. Again, if you want a simple data entry job where you just have to type, transcription work isn’t what you are looking for.
In a nutshell, in order to type this data, you have to have the data in some other form, and getting that data to you at home poses a large problem. As easy as “data entry from home” sounds on the surface, in reality, it is much more complicated.
If you are looking for some basics about working from home, check out the following articles:
Ground Rules for Working from Home, Part One
Ground Rules for Working from Home, Part Two
Ground Rules for Working from Home, Part Three