Barcodes – A Convenient Way to Work with Personnel Files

Barcodes have accompanied us for years with every purchase and although few people pay attention to them, their significance in our daily lives is huge.

So how can we use their functions, known from shopping, to also benefit and support us every day in working with employee documentation?

Barcodes are actually encoded information that can be read from images – so they are perfectly suited for identifying document categories and controlling processes.

Imagine a situation where we have 1000 such annexes to scan... and each of them must be manually assigned to the correct person and category. That’s a lot of work!

Barcode on the document

Now let’s see the situation when a code is placed on the document, for example one created in our e-File when printing an annex to the employment contract:

Each barcode contains information encoded by vertical bars that our scanner reads while creating the PDF document. For example, the first bar is 11, then a white space is 0, the next smaller bar is 1 and again 0, which means: 11010010000 10001101000 10011011100… etc. Every eleven such zeros and ones represent one letter.

In this case, our program reads the following information:

Next 0 and 1	Numerical value	Recognized letter
10001101000	37	E
10011011100	13	–
10110001110	43	K
10111001100	15	/
10001011000	34	B
11011100100	53	U
10111011000	45	M
11100010110	56	X
10111001100	15	/
11001110010	18	2
11001110010	18	2
11001011100	19	3
10010011110	82	checksum

After reading all the letters, their codes are summed and divided. If the resulting checksum matches the value of the last code (here 82), then the reading was correct.

For example above: (104 + 37*1 + 13*2 + 43*3 + 15*4 + 34*5 + 53*6 + 45*7 + 56*8 + 15*9 + 18*10 + 18*11 + 19*12) modulo 103 = 82 (which is correct)

* The values 104 and 103 are constants for the CODE-128B standard.

This approach ensures convenient automation of the barcode recognition process and additionally guarantees the correctness of document type recognition – exactly as it happens during shopping in a store.

As a result, we no longer have to manually assign documents to a selected person and category. The program does it for us, recognizing that E-K means our barcode from the e-File, BUMX is an annex to the contract document, and 223 is our employee's number.

O on the use of barcodes in the e-file  you can read in the next article on our blog.