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The use of paper business files in your business can considerably reduce productivity and increase costs in a wide range of business procedures. Perhaps the best instance of these inefficiencies happens in the accounting department.

Types of business files

Just what do we mean by business documents? Generally speaking, they are the communication vehicles by which business is performed and recorded. Invoices, for example, are business documents that convey the need to pay for a purchased product or service. Purchase orders notify vendors that a client wants to buy something. Purchase order requisitions initiate product or service acquisition requests, cross the approval cycle, and end up with a purchasing agent for fulfillment. And let’s remember checks, which are orders to a bank to pay this quantity of money to that person, and remittance advice, which informs payees how much and for what they are getting paid.

Document Management Systems Applications in the Business Accounting Department

The purchasing process represents an ideal illustration of how, by bypassing the paper phase, electronic business documents can open extremely significant efficiencies inside an organization or a business.

In conservative processes:

1. An employee obtains a paper purchase requisition form
2. Identifies the needed purchase, records the information on the paper form
3. Puts it in the corporate mail system for distribution to the approver next up-the-line
4. Depending on money amount, it may need further approvals
5. The purchase requisition document arrives at the purchasing department
6. The information is re-keyed into a new form
7. The form gets generated as a purchase order
8. Purchase order is sent off by mail or fax

Delays can occur at any point in the approval process, frequently related to the availability of the executives or managers involved.

Using electronic business document procedures on the corporate network or intranet, the whole process can be completed virtually with a single entry of the information by the requestor. The information can be extracted from stored catalogs and past buy orders or it can be entered again. The document is generated by merging the stored data with the appropriate business document template and sent to relevant parties electronically.

Validators can be notified automatically that a document is in their mailboxes (or on the intranet under authorized access ) awaiting their review. The evaluation process does not need physical presence and once accepted, the requisition can be relayed directly to purchasing. The information is automatically inserted into the purchase order and dispatched to the vendor electronically. The entire chain of events theoretically may be completed in minutes without ever leaving the electronic environment.

The process is similar for virtually all serviceable business documents. Invoices, for instance, can be dispersed electronically, reviewed and accepted, and placed in queue for payment without ever being printed on paper or sent through corporate mail.

By using a digital Document Management Systems solution, accounting departments benefit from improved efficiencies and cost reductions when producing, distributing, and storing business documents. In fact, many organizations and businesses begin their Document Management Systems initiative in this section because of the high likelihood of success and speedy ROI.

Tags: business solutions, business tools, document management, document management system, document management systems