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Automating Accounting Processes with ECM

Simply stated, if you’re not automating your accounting processes, you’re hemorrhaging money. You’ve read the statistics that claim that it can take a minimum of $15 to manually process a single invoice. Now think about your own processes. How much staff time is spent matching documents with requisitions, receipts, invoices, and other supporting documentation? How much money are you losing if you’re unable to take advantage of early pay discounts from vendors? How much would you stand to lose if you can’t demonstrate accountability? The good news is that once you have a handle on your business processes, it’s not that hard to get them under control.

This is what you need to do, and how DocFinity can help you do it:

1. Capture paper and electronic accounting documents.
If your organization is like most, you’re probably dealing with both paper and electronic media. A fundamental step towards optimizing your business processes involves getting the paper out of the process and making everything electronic. First, request to have your invoices sent in electronic format. Second, scan or capture your incoming paper upon receipt. Once you are able to eliminate incoming paper, you can index electronic files and store them in the DocFinity repository so that they can be retrieved easily. Capture is a critical step toward efficiency, but at this point you’ve barely scratched the surface.

2. Extract indexed information by leveraging optical character recognition (OCR).
DocFinity allows you to eliminate costly data entry by capturing data contained within documents during the scanning/import process. OCR can be used to automate time-consuming manual processes such as validation or classification. It simplifies accounting processes that were formerly paper-intensive, such as matching invoices with receipts and flowing requisitions for approvals. In addition to allowing you to further streamline approval and posting, OCR helps you process more documents with fewer staff.

3. Incorporate BPM/Workflow
DocFinity BPM/Workflow allows you to establish best practice rules for processing invoices and receivables with consistency and accountability. Clean invoices and receivables can be processed immediately and approved electronically, with minimal human intervention. This frees your highly-skilled staff to handle exceptions and discrepancies. The ability to automate review, approval, execution, and other tasks helps you expedite turnaround, eliminate errors, and repurpose staff. It also gives you an overview of the status of accounts in the revenue cycle at all times. DocFinity also keeps you apprised of processing volumes and potential bottlenecks.

4. Implement records management strategies.
DocFinity allows you to automate archival, retention, and disposition schedules. This ensures that records are retained and disposed of according to industry standards. DocFinity also helps with disaster recovery, ensuring business continuity in cases of fire, flood, or other disaster.

5. Implement governance procedures.
DocFinity provides accounting departments with transparency, security, and accountability. BPM/Workflow demonstrates beyond refute who accessed what documents, and when, allowing you to establish rules to ensure consistency. This dramatically simplifies audits and compliance initiatives, and allows you to provide better service to shareholders.

Take a closer look at the ways in which DocFinity improves accounting processes.