The profit of paper business documents can considerably reduce productivity and enlarge costs in a wide variety of business processes. May be the best sample of these inefficiencies happens in the accounting department.

Types of business documents

Just what do we mean by business documents? Commonly speaking, they are the communications vehicles by which business is recorded. Invoices, for instance, are business documents that carry the need to pay for a purchased product. Buy orders notify vendors that a customer desires to buy something. Purchase order requisitions initiate product or service acquisition demands, traverse the approval cycle, and end up with a purchasing 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 informs payees how much and for what they are being paid.

Document management Software in the Accounting Department

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

In conventional processes:

1. An employee obtains a paper purchase requisition form
2. Identifies the needed 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 can happen at any point in the approval process, usually related to the availability of the executives or managers included.

Using 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 may be newly entered. The document is generated by merging the stored data with the respective business document model and distributed to relevant parties electronically.

Approvers can 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 may be relayed directly to buying. The information is automatically put 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.

By employing an electronic document management solution, accounting departments benefit from developed efficiencies and cost savings when producing, distributing, and keeping business documents. In fact, many companies start their document management initiative in this department because the high probability of success and speedy ROI.

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