In today’s volatile financial markets, the importance of financial transcription cannot be overstated. Every organisation or business enterprise deals with vast amounts of financial data on an almost daily basis and proper documentation is essential to keep track of these ever-fluctuating businesses. One false move can trigger a chain reaction that can have devastating consequences for your business.
With that in mind, here’s why your business needs financial transcription.
What is financial transcription?
Transcription is the process of converting spoken words into written documentation. It usually involves taking an audio recording of a conversation, or dictating something to a financial transcriber out loud. The transcriptionist will write down everything they hear, proofread the document, and send it back to the client in whatever format they require.
Financial transcription services are largely the same as any other transcription service, but specifically involve the creation of transcripts dealing with financial data from any number of audio recordings or files—it does not simply deal with transcribing each recorded word, but extracts the most valuable data for your company reports.
Financial transcription services can help your business operate globally
Globalisation is causing financial markets around the world to become increasingly intertwined and codependent; making financial transcription and translation services ever more important too. In a blog post on the topic of financial transcription, professional translation agency Global Voices point out, “on a daily basis, it is likely that the language barrier will have to be crossed several times.”
Increasingly, therefore, financial transcription is combined with interpretation or translation methods to deliver a transcript in either the source language, a different target language or both. This is enabling businesses to operate across borders as confidently as when they do business at home.
Financial transcription services help you keep accurate records
Financial transcription is highly beneficial for those who are in the trading or finance sector, but also benefits firms in other non-related sectors for various reasons. It allows professionals in financial and other sectors to keep accurate, informed and up to date records of verbal communications that have passed within or between companies. This ensures all parties involved in making business decisions are fully informed of what they are doing.
While an office assistant or secretary is able to prepare business transcripts in-house, it’s unlikely they can match the speed, efficiency and eye for detail of a trained transcriptionist. Creating a good quality and error free financial transcript, especially in translation, requires specialist knowledge of financial terms and the ability to deal with and make sense of large amounts of data. Even the smallest error in terminology or confused digits can result in an entirely different interpretation.
Financial transcription services saves you cutting corners
Often, businesses requiring a fast transcription of audio files look to technological solutions, but only professional financial transcriptionists can save time without cutting corners in terms of quality. Despite the fact that Microsoft claimed that their speech recognition technology “recognizes the words in a conversation as well as a person does,” advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence transcription software are far from perfect. Even when transcribed word for word, this still fails to convey the nuances of the recorded conversation, conveyed by speakers’ tone, emphasis and even body language.
Professional financial transcriptionists are the solution, then, to these two challenges associated with amateur and machine transcription. With an in-depth knowledge of financial terminology and concepts, as well as a human ability to interpret the real meaning of words, only their specialist services can deliver a financial transcription in no time at all that is precise, accurate and correct.
How do businesses benefit from financial transcription?
Financial transcription offers many advantages to businesses. For one, professional transcripts of detailed financial data and communications will save time and reduce the scope for confusion and misinterpretation of any company documentation—written materials are far easier to digest and easier to scan for relevant information than low- and even high-quality audio files.
Financial transcription also gives businesses the flexibility to repurpose digital and audio content, including webinars, podcasts and dictations, into written reports and materials for sending to clients, customers and stakeholders. This involves the ability to create web content for the purposes of search marketing and SEO as well as for print publication.
By outsourcing financial transcription to specialist financial transcription service providers, your business is able to better focus on the management of your customers and clients. Not only that, but outsourcing your transcription needs to professional translators and interpreters also allows your business to free up hands to take on more important and time sensitive projects, thereby increasing your overall business productivity too.