Author: Rachel Tilley
Processing documents will vary greatly from one organisation to another. How efficiently this happens will be the deciding factor between wasting time and money or staying ahead of the competition.
There are a wealth of business documents that need to be processed on a regular basis and the volume will depend on the size and type of organisation, as well as the product or service being sold.
Invoices, purchase orders, sales orders, contracts, proposals, CVs, delivery notes and more will all follow a specific process to ensure stock is ordered, customers get their goods, suppliers get paid and staff receive their wage.
Whether your business processes hundreds of documents a month or thousands, an error at any stage can have costly consequences. Could an invoice be paid twice and how would you know? Do delivery notes go missing leaving uncertainty about paying for goods that may or may not have been received? Are you retaining personal data longer than you should?
A deciding factor on how successful document processing is will often boil down to whether documents are on paper or in digital format, alongside how and where they are stored.
Paper can easily get lost whilst efficiently processing and storing electronic documents relies on every employee following the same rules.
Streamlining document processes means removing any unnecessary steps, work or people involved in a business
process to improve efficiency. Looking at where and why any problems or bottlenecks occur and how things can be simplified is a good place to start. Does the approach need modernising or would implementing new technology help.
Processing documents is more than just an admin exercise due the important role these documents play in how successful a business operates. If a finance department handles hundreds of paper invoices how long do all the different steps take, what errors can occur and could time be spent better elsewhere?
It's is likely employees days are filled with searching for information across in-trays, folders and desks. Manually matching invoices to purchase orders and delivery notes to ensure there are no discrepancies whilst chasing the appropriate person for document approval. Then there's all the rekeying of information from a paper invoice into a finance system.
Paper processes or those with too many manual steps are slow and error prone as well as tedious for staff. At what cost to the business is a line drawn? When employees are so burnt out from all the paperwork they go off sick, or when an unauthorised order is placed because there were no tight controls around purchasing.
Clients and prospects come to us because they have a problem processing documents efficiently. Whether that's due to growth and old fashion processes hold them back, they have multiple offices making the paper trail hard to manage or because an audit has flagged up the lack of document control.
Whatever the reason, we are here to help.
The team at DocTech have more than 80 years of combined experience in digital document management software. We have a can do attitude and genuinely care about the problems our clients have. We want to put the right solution in place for the long term that meets requirements and improves the working lives of employees.
Our document management software can be used as a basic digital archive (think of it as a virtual filing cabinet) to remove paper from any process, right through to an intricate system of workflows, task management and automatic data capture.
We will provide a solution to meet your needs.
Capturing, storing, accessing and processing documents accurately will save time and money. Paper and associated costs are removed, delays in invoice processing are reduced, time wasted looking for documents is eliminated and errors from manual data entry are no longer a problem.
"Not everyone likes change but we can all now see the benefits that DocuWare has given us and we would never go back to a paper-based process".
Making improvements to document processes needs to be a company wide or department led process depending on the size of the organisation. There are some suggestions we advise all prospects to think about when looking to improve their document processes.
How does a customer order enter the business - phone, website, social media? What problems are you or your customers experiencing with how it's done at the moment.
Accurately capturing that initial information is vital, and consistently capturing it in the same way means errors are minimised and the correct data is being recorded for every order.
Digital forms can be used directly by customers on a company website or by employees when taking a phone call. Once the information is gathered and submitted, a digital form integrated with document management software can automatically kick start the next stage of the process. Whether that's checking stock in an ERP or notifying an employee a task is required.
Managing invoices and purchase orders from receipt to payment is a huge task. How many touch points are there along they way? What's slowing the process down? How much is manual and what could be automated, or what steps could be removed all together?
The manual steps such as sending an invoice to be approved, coding and adding the information into a finance system is problematic. Slow invoice processing can mean suppliers are paid late causing potential disruption to your products and customers. 
Automated invoice processing with a document management system integrated with your finance package means there is much less room for error. Incoming invoices are scanned and information automatically captured, stored in the system and pushed to your finance or ERP package.
No manual data entry is needed and each invoice number can only enter the system once so there are no duplications.
Invoices can be validated by our software based on individual business parameters and where the requirements are met, the invoice is automatically passed on for approval via an email notification.
Documents are easy to find as they are stored centrally and securely so no time is wasted searching in multiple locations. An invoice can be linked to a purchase order to simplify searches further, while approval stamps and annotations can be digitally applied enhancing communication amongst staff.
No process should slow business down or stop goals being reached. Time really is money. The time staff waste on tedious admin tasks is a cost to the business. Paper, printing and storage is a cost to the business. And lost or duplicated invoices is a cost to the business.
Talk with our team of experts about how you can save time and money when processing documents. Start making changes sooner rather than later and stop those time consuming processes and costly errors from affecting the business any longer than they need to.
Call us on 0161 647 7070 or book at time in our diaries below.
