Formats
A capture solution must be able to process a wide variety of business content formats to avoid exception cases and costly workarounds. Business content is commonly either:

Structured
Where both the location and type of information are known and well-defined, e.g. a tax form.
Semi-structured
Where the type of information is known but the location is not, e.g. a purchase invoice.
Unstructured
Where both the location and type of information are unknown e.g. such as in e-mail.

A capture system should be able to transform all three types of content.

Classification
Your capture solution must be able to classify the content being processed e.g. documents, forms, images, folders to determine the correct rules for extracting and routing the information.

Extraction
A capable capture solution must be able to extract specific metadata from a wide variety of business content e.g. forms, documents, e-mails, correspondence.

Separation
A capture solution should be able to separate incoming business content into logical folders, batches or documents. Otherwise, you will have to manually separate content, often at high labour costs.

Validation
To ensure the highest possible accuracy of the extracted metadata you should look for a capture solution with a validation option. Usual validation is carried out through highly efficient manual methods or a variety of automated techniques.

Customisation
The ability to customise the capture solution to meet your specific needs is crucial, whether through customisation of the user interface, import or export capabilities, or selected business rules scripting throughout the capture process.

Upgradeability
A capture solution must enable quick and easy upgrades so you can take advantage of enhancements to the baseline capture solution, even when you have significantly customised your system. New versions of the capture solution should not require significant resources to install.

Distributed Capabilities
Your capture solution must be able to expand across departments and locations as your capture needs expand. The solution should enable both the secure capture of business content from multiple locations and the distribution of processing. It should also provide robust, centralised management of all remote operations.

Total Cost of Ownership
Many organisations focus on the up-front cost of a solution however research carried out by Kofax found that 80% of the costs associated with a capture system is related to ongoing labour. A capture solution should automate and drive down the cost of labour for document preparation, manual validation, quality control, set-up and maintenance.