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The 3 key benefits of digitised document management for Finance

The 3 key benefits of digitised document management for Finance

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Document management for Finance

Your finance department handles a large volume of critical information.  In addition, your finance and accounting processes are key to business continuity. Invoices, delivery notes, expense notes... A lot of data that is often in paper format and takes time to process, index and store. ​
 
Given that budget and resources are limited, how can your finance department manage and share information in the most effective and productive way?​
 
Below we explain the 3 basic benefits that document management software (DMS) offers to improve your finance operations.​

1. Fast storage and retrieval of information​

Many collaborative tasks require processing large amounts of information contained within multiple documents and formats. The implementation of a DMS will improve the efficiency of the handling of information, with a significant impact on the performance of your team.​
 
For example. Let's say your accounting department processes 100 invoices a day that are stored in a physical filing system. In addition, they also need to retrieve 10 already archived invoices. Carrying out this process manually, about 6 hours a day would be lost . ​
 
In contrast, a DMS reduces the time you spend storing or retrieving a document to about 30 seconds each. That is a saving of 100 hours of administrative time a month for your team!

2. Quicker management of delivery notes

When your organisation delivers to a customer, the delivery person asks to sign the delivery note. These delivery notes will be sent to the Finance department on a daily or weekly basis. Once received, Finance must review these packing slips, find the correct contract or purchase order to compare and verify, create the invoice and send it, and finally put all the documents together in a file for storage.​
 
A DMS drastically simplifies this process. Let's take a practical case in which the management of 20 delivery notes a day involves 8 hours a week of manual work between delivery and signing, sending to Finance, verification, sending invoices and filing. If you use a DMS around 30 hours a month can be saved. ​
 
In addition, combining the DMS with the use of a mobile device such as a tablet, the employee will be able to scan or capture the delivery notes and send them to the main office after each delivery. This way invoicing can happen faster.

3. Agile response to inquiries​

About 10% of  invoices that are processed require follow-up. With a paper system, it's easy to spend 15-20 minutes responding to a single query. Perhaps a vendor calls to say they paid the wrong amount, or a customer wants to know why a discount wasn't applied to their bill.​
 
When this happens in a manual process, the employee must look for the invoice in the physical file, locate it and review it. They then have to call the supplier or customer to clarify the issue and finally resubmit the invoice.​
 
If this process is automated, document retrieval time is reduced to seconds and allows employees to resolve issues in a minute or two without hanging up the phone. This could save you about 60 hours of work per month, quickly achieving substantial ROI for your organisation. In addition, the improved customer experienceimproves both satisfaction and retention.

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