Well, the first exercise I did was sending data to the serial monitor, so that's a way to bypass the keyboard - but it isn't particularly workflow friendly.
I don't doubt you could write some code to capture the data stream and do something more useful with it, but that's a step I haven't ventured into. Saving to a text file shouldn't be too hard. Direct updating of a database might be more 'interesting'.
The other thing, too, is that if you are going to get into a background processing application while someone is using the machine on foreground work, you should also think about how this setup will handle abnormal conditions - which can be anything from communication dropouts to data capture confirmation and how to correct data that is in error, duplicate, etc.
In short, a self-contained subsystem.