The double-sided A4 forms contain nearly 3,500 tick boxes, with 69 potential police activities ranging from investigating a burglary to tackling paperwork.

XPS director Greg Roach said: "This is an extremely complex technical job involving an optical block reading machine similar to those used by the National Lottery to read the tickets, only vastly more complicated as some have up to 500 blocks to read per form."

Printed on a Heidelberg QMDI 46, there is no margin for error, to ensure that the scanner can accurately record the information without rejecting it.

"Not only does the registration have to be perfect but the actual image position on each sheet must be 100% consistent from batch to batch and run to run," said Roach.

The initial project was for 19,500 forms for Sussex Police, whose references resulted in a further eight on-going police contracts. This equates to 232,000 forms and is worth a combined 50,000 per annum.

XPS employs 34 staff and has a turnover of 2.3m.

Story by Rachel Barnes