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The profit of paper business documents is able to significantly cease productivity and enlarge costs in a wide variety of business processes. Perhaps the best sample of such inefficiencies occurs in the accounting department.

Types of business documents

Just what do we mean by business documents? Generally speaking, they are the communications vehicles by which business is executed. Invoices, for example, are business documents that carry the need to pay for a purchased product. Purchase orders notify vendors that a user wants to buy something. Purchase order requisitions initiate output or service acquisition demands, traverse the approval cycle, and end up with a buying agent for fulfillment. And let’s not forget checks, which are orders to a bank to pay this sum to that person, and remittance advice, which announces payees how much and for what they are being paid.

Document management Software in the Accounting Department

The purchasing process shows a perfect illustration of how, by bypassing the paper stage, electronic business documents can launch extremely significant efficiencies within an organization.

In conventional processes:

1. An employee gets a paper purchase requisition form
2. Identifies the necessary purchase, records the information on the paper form
3. Places it in the corporate mail system for distribution to the approver next up-the-line
4. Depending on dollar amount, it may require 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 fax

Delays may occur at any point in the approval process, usually related to the availability of the executives or managers included.

Utilizing electronic business document management processes on the corporate network or intranet, the whole process can be completed virtually with a single entry of the data by the requestor. The data can be extracted from saved catalogs and past purchase orders or it can be newly entered. The document is made by merging the stored data with the respective business document model and distributed to relevant parties electronically.

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

By using an electronic document management solution, accounting departments profit from developed efficiencies and cost savings when making, distributing, and storing business documents. In fact, many organizations start their document management initiative in this department because the high probability of success and speedy ROI.

Tags: benefits of document management, document management, document management for business, document management for your company, document management software