Three Ways Going Paperless Will Supercharge Your AP Process
Sure, your paper filing system works (most of the time.) Unless a document gets buried at someone’s desk, misfiled or otherwise lost during the accounts payable process. Then late fees start to pile up and the time spent searching and filing becomes unmanageable. Going paperless will allow you to carry out the process more quickly and effectively – empowering your team to focus their time on more important tasks.
Our goal is to make sure you’re equipped with the right tools to help your business succeed. It’s always a good idea to take a look at the way you’re doing things now and think critically about how you can improve on it. If you’re still moving paper documents around your organization, we’d like you to consider these three ways going paperless can help you do it better.
Eliminate Time Spent Searching and Filing
You may not realize how much time you spend each day walking over to the file cabinet to search for documents or file them, but I challenge you to start timing yourself. If you could gain back all of that time to focus on getting invoices processed more quickly, that would have a huge impact. With an electronic document repository, you could search and instantly retrieve an image of the document right from your desktop. Anyone with the appropriate security privileges can access the documents they need from wherever they are.
Get Approvals Faster
Approval delays might be another factor holding you back – especially if you have multiple approval levels or approvers in different office locations. We’ve talked to companies that ship stacks of invoices to other offices for approval each day, which can get very expensive. With a document management system, those documents would move through an electronic workflow. The movement of those documents can be automated and monitored to be sure the approvals occur within a set amount of time. Approvers have the option to review invoices from within the document management application, through email, or on a mobile device. Reminder emails can be triggered to notify the approver and others involved in the process when there are documents ready for approval so nothing gets missed.
Leverage Keystrokes
An integrated document management solution like Sage ERP Document Management will speak to your accounting system to minimize the amount of data you’re having to enter. If coding needs to be added to an invoice, a form with validated data from your ERP will travel with the document image to allow for coding and data entry throughout the approval process. Anyone involved in the process can choose from those validated drop down fields regardless of whether or not they have an ERP license. When the document and the data traveling with it have been approved, the data can be imported to the ERP. Instead of scribbling on a paper for someone else to read and type out later, that data is entered from the start and repurposed wherever possible.
There are many other reasons you should consider going paperless including significant cost and time savings. We are here to help you learn about your options and determine if document management makes sense for your business. A good place to start is scheduling a business process review with us so we can talk through your current processes and start to calculate a sample return on investment.
Contact us at AM@GoISM.com to find out more.