A system for remote data acquisition and centralized processing and storage provides comprehensive support for processing documents and electronic data associated with different applications including sales, business, banking and general consumer transactions. The system retrieves transaction data such as credit card receipts or checks in either electronic or paper form at one or more remote locations, encrypts the data, transmits the encrypted data to a central location, transforms the data to a usable form, performs identification verification using signature data and biometric data, generates informative reports from the data and transmits the informative reports to the remote location(s), providing high performance, security, reliability, fault tolerance and low cost. The network architecture facilitates secure communication between the remote location(s) and the central processing facility, a dynamic address assignment algorithm performs load balancing among the system's servers for faster performance and higher utilization, and a partitioning scheme improves the error correction process.