Too much paperwork is a common problem among accountants, especially during tax season. As an accountant, you have several duties. To file the appropriate financial paperwork and to find ways for your client to use their money more efficiently.
More than likely, that first task takes so much time that it’s hard to do the rest of your job. It’s hard to find better ways to keep the company afloat when you’re drowning in paperwork. How do you deal with all of these financial documents, let alone use them to correct for inefficiencies?
U.S. businesses waste $8 billion annually just managing paper. It costs an organization an average of $20 to file a document, $120 to find a misplaced document and $220 to reproduce a lost document.
A New Solution to Focus on Efficiency
Stop Repeating Work
The first step you should take is to digitize your documents. Having your documents accessible via the computer or mobile device isn’t just more convenient than having to pour over metal filing cabinets, but also comes with so many more benefits. It costs less to store your documents digitally than it does to pay for the physical space necessary to store and maintain hard copies. Digital filing structures make it easy to put your documents exactly where you want them so they’re easily accessible at all times.
You need a solution that allows you to create and save folder templates you can use to speed up your workflow. For example, every time you want to make a specific type of folder, and you know you’re going to need specific documents in it, you can create an easy to apply template that will copy over the files saved in that template.
Going Digital
You may be worried that digitizing your documents will take too much time. Without a system that utilizes intelligent organization tools, you’d have to scan them in, find their place in the file structure, and write some notes down so you can search for that document later. However, there’s an easier method.
Optical character recognition (OCR) technology can be employed to capture the text of physical documents, which can be used to route them into the correct spot in your system. Inversely, this same technology can help you find your files instantly. A system with OCR can scour your system for the documents you need, using only a few keywords that you know are contained in the document, and not just the file name.
An Intelligent System
The next problem to address with your workflow is the constant chase for approvals. The world of accounting requires a lot of signatures from a lot of different people. Part of what makes your job hard is determining who a document needs to go to, finding these employees, and getting them to sign paperwork.
Automated workflows get rid of the need to chase people down for signatures. These systematic processes work on conditional rules, which allows you to program that system to route documents to different users if certain conditions are met. Combined with OCR technology, this system can be quite complex and able to handle any kind of mundane process, automatically.
For example, depending on the dollar amount contained in a specified field of the document, the system will refer to your rules to determine where it needs to be transferred for approval, then where it needs to be archived depending on if it’s approved or rejected.
These capabilities, along with superior compliance and security tools, are all available in eFileCabinet document management software. To see eFileCabinet in action, click here to schedule a personalized demo.
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