Are you one of the three out of four businesses who currently have an active financial process transformation underway? According to the American Productivity and Quality Center, third-quarters of respondents are working on automated accounting procedures, like electronic document management, to improve financial operations and reduce related costs.
Electronic document management is for more than just financial matters; it can improve the overall performance of your organization and create long-term results.
Paper invoices and manual invoice processing are inefficient and cumbersome. When it comes to invoices, reducing lag time is optimal—the process is slowed down considerably if every invoice must be reviewed and approved by a specific person. With financial practices, in particular, the faster items are managed and paid, the better because those with effective review and approval practices are typically cash-strong. Furthermore, automation helps facilitate the rewards of early payment discounts. Paper pushing makes this nearly impossible; while digitizing and automating workflows with document management increases efficiency and precision.
It is fair to say that nearly everyone dreads the annual company audit. Help your employees, especially those in the finance department, dread it less by converting to digital document storage. With paper-based accounting records, the audit process can be disorganized and tedious for your staff and the auditor. Rather than digging through boxes and file cabinets, wouldn’t it be amazing if you could search a secure, centralized database and bring up all of the necessary documentation? Well, with electronic document management that dream can be a reality.
Furthermore, with so many regulations and confidentiality guidelines, document management will help ensure that your data does not get leaked or accessed by unauthorized parties. Utilize access requirements to enable your auditor's permission to access certain data (say, all outgoing invoices from the last two years) while protecting the rest of your confidential documentation. With paper files, once you give access to a folder or file cabinet, anything inside is fair game as they search the necessary information.
Smoother audits and faster invoice processing are just two of the many benefits of automating your document workflows. If you are not already one of the many businesses currently making the switch from paper to digital, you could be outpaced by your competitors.