Every day more and more information flows into your organization — everything from invoices and payments to emails, documents and social media data. Unless you have a good document management system in place, all of that information gets stored in disparate systems and locations. As a result, the ever-increasing flow of information becomes less usable and takes longer to find.
Inefficient document management contributes to some obvious expenses, such as the costs related to filing and storing paper documents. But a cumbersome process could also result in less-obvious opportunity costs, such as the loss of discounts.
If your organization uses a paper-based process for accounts payable, for example, an employee must spend time copying invoices and filing duplicates before routing them to colleagues for approval. These approvals often take too long, either because invoices get lost along the way, or the approvers are unavailable for some reason.
Such a system makes it difficult to consistently pay your invoices on time, preventing your organization from taking advantage of early-payment discounts. In time, you could also end up on a key vendor’s “black list” and have a hard time collecting on receivables.
Now, instead of a paper-based invoice management system, imagine that you scan invoices once when they arrive, and the documents are automatically indexed and stored in a secure central repository. For approvals, the system pushes the electronic invoices out to approvers for review, with status reports and alerts to prevent overdue payments.
This way, vendor invoices are paid on time and your business operations move more smoothly with no invoice management headaches.
As more companies embrace remote employees and use mobile devices to conduct business, it’s even more important that your core business systems not depend on having your staff in the same physical office. It’s now expected that people have mobile access to your business information wherever they’re located. It’s difficult to approve a paper invoice when you’re traveling and your desk’s inbox is 3,000 miles away. But that’s no problem when you’re using a digital document management system.
In a competitive market, success may depend on how well your organization processes and manages the constant flow of business information while allowing your employees to focus on their core tasks. Unless you have a good document management system, the ever-increasing flow of information becomes less usable, and locating the documents you need becomes a difficult and time-consuming process.
If your current processes just aren’t able to keep up, you stand to improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of your organization by upgrading to digital document management.
Learn more about overhauling your document management processes by downloading our FREE whitepaper, “7.5 Signs Your Document Management Needs An Overhaul.”
