Quicker Turnaround with Workflow

All offices have their day-to-day protocols and routines when it comes to handling their paperwork. Certain forms need approval from certain supervisors before the next action item can take place. There can’t be any exceptions or any shortcuts, especially if your business is beholden to certain compliance standards and can be subject to auditing. The larger the office and the larger the volume of paperwork, the more difficult it can be to track and make sure everything gets to the right people and the system keeps moving. Having a complicated system takes time, and at any point, one step gets held up, it holds up the whole system.

A common type of these routines is a payment approval process. For businesses that make frequent purchases of supplies and resources, invoices for the purchases need to be reviewed by multiple supervisors to make sure the company is spending its money sensibly. The trouble comes from quickly reviewing and identifying where an invoice needs to go and efficiently getting it there. Different amounts require different levels of approval.

Then there’s the matter of keeping the process moving along, without having to badger everyone involved to either approve a form or move it along to the next stage of the process. This can sometimes fall on the shoulders of one or two employees who have other more important duties other than chasing paperwork and signatures.

Automate: Set it and forget it

With document management, it is possible to set up a system that conducts your redundant document processes automatically. eFileCabinet provides a comprehensive, custom workflow automation tool. With workflows, the forwarding of documents to the supervisors begins as soon as it is uploaded to the system. Turnaround is instantly boosted.

Workflows are created using conditional instructions that make up a tree of requirements and actions. So you can program the system to automatically send the document to a designated location, send notifications to certain users, and other actions when certain requirements, such as approval, are met.

The power of automation is further supported by intelligent optical character recognition. The system is able to identify values in preselected fields to allow the system to execute multiple actions based on those values. For a payment approval workflow, the system can identify the balance owed in the invoice. The system can be set up to send invoices with a lower dollar amount to a designated supervisor like an assistant director, while ones with an amount that’s higher are sent to a higher level like the VP of Finance for approval.

The designated supervisor, as well as the employee who started the workflow, can be sent notifications to inform them that there’s an action item awaiting their approval, along with multiple reminders, to keep the workflow moving.

The designated user can either approve, (with or without a signature) or reject, and the system is programmed to know what to do in either scenario. If it’s approved, then it can be sent to the next step in the workflow, whether it’s to another user for secondary approval, to an accounting clerk to be paid and then to archived with a retention date attached. If it’s rejected, it can be sent back to the sender with a request for more data to justify the purchase.

Why It’s Important

The primary goal of eFileCabinet is to revolutionize how offices do business by making them more efficient and help them rethink their everyday processes. Workflow automation is a big part of the mission, allowing offices to automate the processes that cost them time and money by making it the focus of many employee’s jobs. With workflows automated, businesses can begin thinking about their processes in a new light and allow them to further streamline them to make the most out of their resources.

The workflow tools are highly customizable, so users can set up workflows for just about any kind of document process. However, eFileCabinet works with clients to help them set up workflows around how their business works. To find out more about eFileCabinet and how workflows can boost turnaround, fill out the form below to view a free demo.