How Technology Has Changed Accounting

Technology has totally changed how accounting firms do business. Here are just a few examples.

Faster Approvals

Normally, when a business owner is applying for a loan they have to provide a wide variety of documents. These documents can sometimes be difficult to get and even harder to analyze and file. This is part of what takes underwriting such a long time. But that document processing is a lot easier thanks to new innovations in the technology space.

Better technology has led to a faster underwriting process. Which translates to faster loan approval times. With the right document management software, it’s easier than ever to organize and process all of the documents that come with a complicated business loan. This means you’re spending less time entering data and more time approving or rejecting loans.

And remember, the faster you can approve a loan, the more loans you can issue.

Greater Access To Information

It takes time and effort to process, organize, and maintain your company’s financial paperwork. Time and effort that you could spend on more profitable tasks for your firm. But nonetheless, you need access to the information contained on various documents before you can do any strategic-accounting work,

With the advances in document management technology, the right software can organize, store, and manage your documents for you. That way you’re not spending your time filing, retrieving, and refiling your documents. Instead, you can spend the bulk of your day analyzing your documents so you can help your client make more money.

In short, technology helps make you a more valuable employee.

More Secure Document Handling

How often do you find yourself needing to get a coworker’s or client’s signature? Probably pretty often. And how do you send them the documents they need to sign? By email? In the mail? In a zipped file? PGP? Different methods of sending documents can give you different levels of security, but they also come with different drawbacks as well.

More updated document management systems provide their own document delivery system so you can send documents to clients and coworkers with ease without having to worry about hackers, thieves, or misdeliveries.

Rubex, an eFileCabinet property, comes with a service called SecureDrawer. It lets our clients send and receive their documents. SecureDrawer actually comes with bank-grade encryption to make sure that your documents stay as safe as possible.

Less Basic Skills, More Strategic Roles

There are accountants and there are accountants. Or at least that’s how it used to be. The type of work you were able to do was dependent on how much time you had in the office. Some new accountants were little more than glorified paper organizers. Newcomers had to work their way up in seniority before they could provide any real value to the company beyond paperwork care.

But thanks to those aforementioned advances in technology, firms don’t need as many paper-pushers as they did before. So, a firm can do more strategic accounting while still hiring the same number of accountants. That’s because those new hires can work directly on accounting strategy instead of wasting time organizing papers.

Small Tasks Are Easily Automated

How much of your day is dedicated to filing paperwork, chasing signatures, informing coworkers and clients that they need to do something with the documents you sent them yesterday? We’re guessing that a lot of your day is dedicated to smaller tasks. We’ll also guess that a lot of these smaller tasks are getting in the way of the bigger tasks that make money for your firm.

Current document management software solutions such as eFileCabinet can help automate your workflow. You can set up a workflow that will recognize what stage a particular document is in, who needs to access that document, and it will remind them to do whatever it is they need to do for you. These automated workflows will allow you to focus on those larger workflow items that make you a valuable asset to your company and clients.

Tools Reduce Margin Of Error

Technology also helps reduce the margin or error. Automating certain tasks and being able to take advantage of features such as Zonal OCR help make document analysis easier than ever. Of course, your document management software can only help you as far as you allow program it to, but with a little bit of work, you can significantly reduce the number of errors in your work.

Document Organization Systems Have Improved

Modern DMSs can help make it even easier to create, organize, and retrieve documents than ever before. Your DMS should be able to auto-populate a filename every time you create a new document for your company or a client. That means you’ll never lose a document due to a typo because you’re naming convention will be used consistently every, single time.

In addition, Zonal OCR technology can read and recognize different types of digital documents and file them accordingly. All you need to do is give the documents to your DMS to sort. If there’s anything it can’t recognize, it’ll put it in another folder so you can manually look at those documents.

In other words, Zonal OCR is always sure whenever it files your documents, and if it’s not, it’ll send them your way and learn something new about the documents you’re feeding it.

eFileCabinet Can Bring Your Accounting Practice Out Of The Past

If you’re looking to create more value for your accounting firm, without spending more money on it, you should consider eFileCabinet. eFileCabinet can help you spend less time doing work that can be automated so you can spend more time on work that makes money.

eFileCabinet will more than pay for itself in productivity.

If you’re looking to learn more, click here to schedule a free, no-commitment demo.