When you evaluate a Document Management solution to automate invoice processing , you’ll have a lot of questions. This blog post describes the essential aspects of digitizing these processes. Once you have a good grasp of how accounts payable systems are automated, you’ll have the working knowledge you need to make an educated decision and choose the right solution for your organization.
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An accounts payable (AP) team does more than just pay the bills. They also reconcile an invoice with the purchase order and delivery ticket, maintain vendor relationships and negotiate credit terms.
It makes sense not to weigh down AP staff with time-consuming, manual, paper-based tasks. These are just a few of the obstacles that manual processes create.
When invoice processing is completely automated, every step is well defined from data capture to approval to generating a transaction record for posting directly to your accounting or ERP system. The solution should trigger approval workflows based on your business rules to ensure accurate and rapid processing. It should check mandatory data, purchase orders, duplicate invoices, and onboard new vendors quickly. The system should also integrate directly with your accounting or ERP system to eliminate duplicate data entry and manual errors. A digital invoice processing solution delivers many productivity benefits. With an automated system, your accounting staff can:
Digital workflows automate, track, and report on any accounting process. A comprehensive digital workflow allows you to track a document at any stage of the process life cycle. A full range of reports enables you to see how many documents are at any given process stage. The invoice processing workflow should automatically check for duplicate invoices and determine if a vendor is already in the system. If not, the solution should initiate an automated vendor onboarding process. This built-in verification helps eliminate fraudulent invoices.
Automation enables sharing information with anyone on your team who needs visibility into a workflow process. Every employee responsible for completing a particular task can view it in the office automation solution. Email updates can be sent to alert employees to new tasks in their work queues. Exceptions and escalations can be configured easily. At a glance, a manager can see what steps are complete and what remains to be done.
Protecting proprietary data is a number one priority for most organizations. Security is a big concern when documents are stored in a digital archive. Not only do strong security and backup measures ensure information recovery in the case of a disaster, but they keep unauthorized employees out and help meet critical compliance requirements.
Your solution should enable these key functions:
Automating AP doesn’t have to require a large time commitment from your staff or a long, drawn-out implementation. Although business processes differ from company to company, they share key requirements and decision points.
DocuWare for Invoice Processing is a preconfigured cloud solution with prebuilt workflows based on these common denominators. It can be easily adapted to fit your business rules, so the solution can be up and running within a few days. Watch this practical and engaging recorded demo to find out more.
With about 215 employees at its Kansas location, Lawrence Paper Company produces a variety of boxes and packaging materials, ranging from simple brown boxes to items large enough to hold auto parts. The company serves about 2,000 customers ranging from pet food producers to beer brewers, from industrial to retail, and from manufacturing to the automotive industry. Last year, it made enough corrugated sheets to circumnavigate the globe. That volume of work requires precise recordkeeping, which generated a lot of paper. “We’ve been around for so long that we have been doing things the same way for 30 to 40 years,” says Mike Cordaro, IT Specialist & Special Projects Manager. “There was a lot of paper pushing between different departments. We wanted to be more efficient.”
After analyzing the potential performance improvement, Lawrence Paper Company made the decision to go digital. “We thought it would be a good idea from the performance perspective—instead of looking for sheets of paper stuffed inside cabinets,” Cordaro says. “When we installed DocuWare, we had a big shredding party, got rid of the file cabinets and freed up office space.”
The company started its digital transformation in the Accounting department. Prior to DocuWare, when an employee made a purchase, they would initiate a paper trail. A paper-based purchase order would circulate between seven different people and would then be stored in a file cabinet. DocuWare made it easier to reconcile in the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and streamline the work of the Accounts Payable team. “We went from processing 15 invoices a day to processing 100 invoices a day,” Cordaro says. With 35 DocuWare users, 10 to 12 of whom upload files, and the rest act as approvers, the company accumulated over 150,000 documents since installation. The employees particularly enjoy the Intelligent Indexing feature that allows them to automatically file documents from the company’s internal reporting software, iSeries, which speeds up their work.
You want to make your wishes come true? The right solution for you:
