The benefit of paper business documents can considerably reduce productivity and enlarge costs in a wide range of business processes. Probably the best sample of these inefficiencies occurs in the accounting department.

Kinds of business documents

Just what do we mean by business documents? Commonly speaking, they are the communications vehicles by which business is executed. Invoices, for example, are business documents that convey the need to pay for a purchased service. Buy orders notify vendors that a user desires to purchase something. Buy 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 an ideal illustration of how, by bypassing the paper stage, electronic business documents mayt launch extremely significant efficiencies within an company.

In conventional processes:

1. An employee obtains a paper purchase requisition form
2. Identifies the necessary purchase, records the information on the paper form
3. Mounts it in the corporate mail system for distribution to the approver next up-the-line
4. Depending on dollar amount, it may demand further approvals
5. The purchase requisition document goes 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

Delays can occur at any point in the approval process, often 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 may be extracted from stored 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) waiting their review. The review process does not require physical presence and once approved, the requisition may be relayed straightly to buying. The information is automatically put into the purchase order and dispatched to the vendor electronically. The entire chain of events theoretically can be completed in minutes without ever leaving the electronic environment.

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