In this 4-minute Wall Street Journal video, Joel Bruckenstein, founder of Technology Tools for Today, outlines a few mobile apps that he recommends for financial advisors, including Laserfiche.
Citizens expect efficient and responsive services from their local government. But with limited resources and ever-growing demands, many municipalities struggle to keep up. This is where process automation comes in – a game-changer for modernizing government operations.
Process automation leverages technology to automate repetitive, manual tasks. Think data entry, permit applications, scheduling appointments, and more. Instead of employees getting bogged down in paperwork, automation frees them to focus on higher-level tasks and citizen interaction.
Enhanced Efficiency: Automated processes streamline workflows, reducing processing times and freeing up staff time. Imagine permit applications automatically routed for approval or public inquiries answered by chatbots – that’s automation in action!
Improved Accuracy: Manual data entry is prone to errors. Automation eliminates this risk, leading to more accurate data and better decision-making.
Increased Transparency: Automated workflows often involve online portals which provide citizens with real-time updates on the status of their requests. This fosters trust and transparency.
Reduced Costs: By streamlining processes and minimizing errors, automation can lead to significant cost savings for local governments.
Empowered Employees: Freeing up staff from routine tasks allows them to focus on more strategic initiatives and provide better service to citizens.
Examples of Automation in Action:
Permitting: Online portals allow citizens to submit and track permit applications electronically, simplifying the process for everyone.
License Renewals: Automated reminders and online renewal options make the process smoother for both citizens and government staff.
Public Records Requests: Automated systems can streamline the process of requesting and fulfilling public records requests.
Citizen Service Requests: Chatbots or virtual assistants can answer frequently asked questions and route more complex inquiries to the appropriate staff member.
While automation solutions offer tremendous benefits, navigating the landscape can be overwhelming. This is where partnering with a local solution provider with government expertise becomes invaluable. Here’s why:
Understanding Your Needs: Local providers understand the unique challenges faced by government agencies in your region. They can tailor automation solutions to your specific workflows and compliance requirements.
Government Knowledge: They possess in-depth knowledge of government regulations and best practices, ensuring your automation efforts align with legal and security protocols.
Seamless Integration: Local providers can seamlessly integrate new automation systems with your existing government IT infrastructure, minimizing disruption and ensuring a smooth transition.
Ongoing Support: They offer ongoing support and training to your staff, ensuring they can effectively utilize the new automated systems.
Getting Started with Process Automation:
Pilot Program: Start with a small-scale pilot program to test the effectiveness of automation in your chosen area.
Training and Support: Provide proper training to staff on how to use the new automated systems. Partner with your local solution provider for comprehensive training and ongoing support.
Process automation isn’t about replacing public servants – it’s about empowering them. By automating the mundane and partnering with a local expert, local governments can free up their talented workforce to focus on what matters most: serving their citizens effectively.
Identify Repetitive Tasks: Begin by pinpointing areas where employees spend a significant amount of time on repetitive, manual tasks.
Evaluate Automation Tools: Research different workflow automation software options that fit your specific needs and budget. Consider partnering with a local solution provider at this stage to gain valuable insights.
Here on the ECM Blog, we talk a lot about the roles and responsibilities of records managers—but not all organizations actually have records managers. In the case of human resources (HR), maintaining employee records often falls on the HR department itself.
HR professionals shouldn’t spend too much time acting as records managers, yet it’s crucial to comply with government and company policies regarding employee files. How can HR professionals balance compliance with the core responsibilities of HR? The key lies in three words: Transparent Records Management.
Here’s why managing employee records is difficult and how Transparent Records Management can be used in organizations without a dedicated records manager.
Records management is the practice of filing, retaining and destroying company records in accordance with government and industry regulations.
The challenge is that most employees aren’t thinking in terms of records management when they create and use documents. Regular employees organize documents based on their daily needs, not the rules of retention and destruction set forth by the IRS, state governments and so on.
For example, an HR professional might prefer to organize her files by employee name. She creates a new folder for each new employee and keeps it in a file cabinet. But within each employee’s file is a mixture of documents—each with different records management requirements. Imagine how time-consuming it would be to search through every employee file for W4s during tax season or manually locate records that are ready for disposition.
A first step toward better records management is implementing enterprise content management (ECM) software, which allows organizations to store records in an electronic repository. This solves the problem of manually sifting through cabinets of employee files, but it does not change the way an HR professional organizes employee files—arranging them by employee name is still the most logical approach for an HR professional. Fortunately, there’s a way to retain this file structure and still make records management easier for HR.
Transparent Records Management allows the same ECM repository to be viewed in two different ways. For HR, one view can display employee records by employee name while a second view displays employee records by record type: applications, insurance documents, tax documents and so forth.
This ability to arrange the same repository of employee files in two different ways is key to efficient HR records management. Regular HR employees can access a folder structure relevant to their jobs while a designated HR administrator sees a folder structure designed for records management.
The important thing to remember here is that transparent records management provides two views of the same repository, not two separate repositories. The “regular” view actually contains shortcuts to the original documents. This means that if a document is edited in the “regular” view of the HR repository, that change is reflected in the “records management” view as well—sort of like The Matrix. This function of transparent records management prevents unnecessary duplication of documents and ensures information consistency.
Were you one of those students who, despite your teachers’ warnings, continued to write in your books? If so, you have a lot of company—some of it illustrious (no pun intended). And now, there are a number of efforts going on around the world to capture these scribbled snippets of wisdom.
The notion of “marginalia,” or making handwritten notes and drawings in the margins of book pages, dates back as far as the Middle Ages. Presumably, monks made random drawings and notes to relieve the tedium of the manuscripts they were copying. Once mechanical printing started, marginalia really took off as scholars of the day held debates with the books they were reading—not so different from comment sections on websites.
To the despair of librarians everywhere, marginalia has marched on. “Such readers feel that they aren’t really giving a book their full attention unless they’re hovering over it with a pencil, poised to underline or annotate at the slightest provocation,” writes Mark O’Connell in the New Yorker, going on to quote George Steiner’s description of an intellectual as “a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.” Writers such as Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Graham Greene, and Mark Twain were all noted for their habit of scribbling in books written by others.
These notes can still be useful to us today, say researchers. “This diverse evidence of annotation provides a considerable range of unique and largely untapped research materials, which reveal that readers—much as users of the internet today—adapted quickly to the technology of print: interacting intimately, dynamically, socially, and even virtually with texts,” writes Johns Hopkins University.
In fact, Johns Hopkins goes on to call marginalia “among the largest, least accessible, and most underutilized of original manuscript sources from the early modern period, due to the fact that they are almost entirely uncatalogued, or undercatalogued, by major research collections throughout the world.”
That’s what marginalia digitization projects hope to change. Here are some examples:
The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe, a joint venture of Johns Hopkins, Princeton and University College London, will transcribe and catalog marginal notes in 16th- and 17th-century books held in various libraries. The project will begin with a number of heavily annotated books and expand from there, eventually producing a large, fully searchable dataset available on a publicly accessible website.
Annotated Books Online enables people to add transcriptions and translations and upload annotated books of their own, access to which is then provided free of charge to researchers. Thus far, it contains about 60 volumes, including Martin Luther’s copy of the New Testament.
The Darwin Manuscripts Project, which currently offers “digital access to all of the 34,643 folios [of Darwin’s] that deal directly with the theory of evolution.” “Transcriptions are essential, as Darwin’s handwriting is often difficult to read, and having his marginalia, notes, and letters be legible can more readily support new research,” writes Allison Meier in Hyperallergenic. These include scribblings in books he studied, abstracts, book drafts, articles and their revisions, journals he read, and his notebooks on transmutation. “There are even some charming oddities like drawings by Darwin’s children on the back of leaves of The Origin of Species,” Meier notes.
Digitizing Walt Whitman’s Annotations and Marginalia is a project that has been going on at the University of Texas at Austin since 2007. “Using Walt Whitman’s manuscript marginalia—his annotations and other scribblings on other writers’ printed works—we have built prototype tools for marking up such documents as well as for displaying interactive search results for such documents using images and text,” notes the project’s website.
Hidden in Plain View: Making Visible the Robbins Library’s Marginalia Collection is a project that began this summer to digitize the marginalia at Harvard University’s Robbins Library. “Interest in readers’ marginalia ranges across disciplinary bounds,” writes Eric Johnson-DeBaufre of Robbins Library of Philosophy. “Making visible our collection of marginalia thus stands to benefit philosophers as well as historians, literary scholars, and others.”
As people progress to reading books electronically, does this mean the death of marginalia? Just the opposite, actually. Some marginalia aficionados see it as a new revolution, equivalent to that of Gutenberg. “Imagine reading, say, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and touching a virtual button so that—ping!—Ernest Hemingway’s marginalia instantly appears, or Ralph Ellison’s, or Mary McCarthy’s. Or imagine you’re reading a particularly thorny passage of Paradise Lost and suddenly—zwang!—up pops marginalia from a few centuries of poets (Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Emerson, Eliot, Pound), with their actual handwriting superimposed on the text in front of you,” writes self-confessed marginaliaist Sam Anderson in the New York Times. “This, it seems to me, would be something like a readerly utopia.”
What do you imagine when you hear the word “signature?” 50 years ago we might all have had the same answer, but today, “ink on paper” isn’t the only option for authorizing a document or transaction.
A wet signature is created when a person physically marks a document. In some cultures this is done by writing a name in a stylized, cursive format (or even a simple “X”) on a piece of paper. Other cultures use name seals to the same effect. In both cases, the word “wet” implies that the signature requires time to dry, as it was made with ink or wax.
Various legal definitions exist for electronic signatures, but the term most generally refers to the acknowledgement or adoption of an electronic message, transaction or document. Some examples include:
Sometimes referred to as a cryptographic signature, a digital signature is considered the most “secure” type of electronic signature. It includes a certificate of authority, such as a Windows certificate, to ensure the validity of the signatory (the signature’s author and owner).
The parties on either side of a digital signature can also detect whether the signed document was altered or changed in any way that would invalidate it. In addition, electronic messages are signed with the sender’s private decryption key and verified by anyone who can access the sender’s public encryption key; this further ensures that both parties are who they say they are and that the content of the message has not been changed or intercepted.
Digital and electronic signatures are often used synonymously, but most types of electronic signatures do not have the security features of true digital signatures.
Some common uses for digital signatures include electronic tax forms, applications for business permits and online college applications.
The use of wet, electronic or digital signatures is left to the discretion of each party. Since the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (ESIGN) went into effect in 2000, digital and electronic signatures have held the same legal standing as wet signatures. Nevertheless, some organizations and individuals still prefer handwritten signatures.
The ESIGN act does preserve the right of a party to use or accept wet signatures even if the documentation in question is electronic. It is up to each organization to create its own policy around signatures.
Many document-based business processes require signatures, such as the approval of contracts, invoices and employee evaluation forms. Wet signatures tend to slow these processes down because of their dependence on the physical exchange of paper, but even electronic signatures can become impediments when someone fails to sign a document in a timely manner.
Organizations operate at peak efficiency when electronic signatures are incorporated into an automated business process. For example, as the following video shows, if a manager forgets to sign an invoice, an automated system can send her an email reminder after a period of time has passed.
One of the fastest ways to get started with incorporating digital signatures into your automated business processes is to use a solution marketplace. These marketplaces offer an extensive range of pre-built solutions, templates and integrations for users of a particular platform. For example, Laserfiche offers an Adobe Sign integration on its marketplace.
Explaining a concept to an unfamiliar audience requires more than expert knowledge—you need to be able to adapt your message so it’s relatable and thought-provoking. Records management, with its myriad rules and regulations, can sound almost like another language to the untrained ear. But employees who don’t understand the importance of electronic records management are unlikely to follow its rules, leaving the organization at risk and the records manager constantly frustrated.
We asked a group of over 3,000 records managers on LinkedIn how they explain records management to regular employees who do not share their expertise or daily business goals. Here are eight takeaways from that discussion.
Straightforward messages are easier to understand and remember, but it can be a challenge to break down the many aspects of records management. Rich Lauwers, Director of Information Governance at Merrill Corporation, shared a simple slogan that was passed on to him from a colleague:
Records management is knowing what you have, where you have it and how long you have to keep it.
By starting every client conversation with this slogan, Rich is able to ease any anxiety caused by the changing regulations, practices and legal ramifications of records management.
Besides the CEO, the records manager is one of the few people who has a comprehensive view of the organization’s methods and operations. This knowledge is collected over the years through information audits and policy reviews, giving the records manager keen insight into the routines of regular employees.
Records managers can use this global view to address “throw it over the wall” thinking—i.e., when departments pass off responsibilities to the next department without considering the impact on organizational efficiency. A common example of this is when one department passes a paper form to the next department, which then has to enter the form data into its software system—using a consistent electronic form would save time for everyone.
Once records managers help regular employees understand they’re all part of the same team, those employees might be more receptive to sharing the duties of records management.
Records management, like IT, exists to support the infrastructure of an organization. It is crucial that employees view records management not as a resting place for unneeded documents but as a set of principles that must be followed in every department and process.
In order to communicate this idea, records managers should first understand how their users operate by asking:
With these questions answered, records managers can explain records management and the useful role it plays in the day-to-day lives of regular employees.
If the message of the records manager tends to fall on deaf ears, change the speaker. One LinkedIn member used video recorded messages from his organization’s CEO and Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer to roll out a new records management program. In his case, it was crucial to go beyond C-level approval and have executives actively advocate the records management initiative.
When employees claim that records management is too complicated to handle on their own, it helps to relate organizational records management to personal records management. For instance, home life requires you to sort mail and throw out what you don’t need, keep some mail until an action is completed (such as paying a bill) and retain other pieces of mail as required (such as tax documents).
In this way, records managers prove that regular employees already practice records management to some extent, making it less alien of a concept. The main distinction is that in an organization, everyone must follow the same rules and the consequences of non-compliance affect more people.
Certain people require dramatic examples to be shaken out of apathy. I am in no way endorsing the idea of staging an emergency in the records storage facility, but it can help to go over the worst-case scenarios of non-compliance. For example, one wealth management firm experienced a six month FINRA audit that essentially put business on hold. According to one LinkedIn member, sharing these horror stories prompts action from regular employees without much effort from the records manager.
This approach should be made with caution as employees might replace arbitrary recordkeeping behavior with record hoarding, which can still put the organization at risk.
Electronic or automated records management can make compliance easier for records managers and regular employees, so why would anyone resist the idea? One LinkedIn member emphasized the importance of phrasing records management initiatives so that employees focus on the direct benefits, such as taking on more valuable tasks, improving service and freeing up office space. On the other hand, records managers should avoid associating an automated system with staff reduction.
Ultimately, some people need to realize the importance of records management on their own and not because someone gave them a list of rules. With these employees, it helps to let them explain records management to themselves.
To use this method, records managers should ask several questions and engage in two-way conversations with regular employees. For example, a records manager at a university can ask an administrator, “What bothers you about the current student records system?” A possible answer might be, “I dislike it when I ask for a student record and it takes a week for the student services department to respond, then when I get it, the file’s incomplete.” This answer highlights the value of an electronic records management system with a searchable database, which the administrator identified in her own way.
A company with internal strife among departments is like a person who constantly trips over his own feet. Progress is nil, and the potential for self-destruction is almost comical. Glassdoor is an employer review site that reveals the best—and worst—companies to work for. Employees at low rated companies frequently mention “poor communication” and “disorganization” in their reviews, which are key indicators that collaboration is lacking. Not coincidentally, several of these companies have also been rated poorly by their customers. Here are four ways an organization can drive interdepartmental collaboration, which can ultimately improve customer service.
In BOOM!: 7 Choices for Blowing the Doors Off Business-As-Usual, authors Kevin and Jackie Freiberg point out that firefighters, police forces and other first responders rarely get caught up in “tribalistic” or fragmented behavior when working together because there is no confusion as to what their goal is: saving lives. Collaboration comes a lot easier when every department realizes and works toward a shared goal. It’s no longer about every department for itself—it’s about working together to accomplish the larger enterprise mission.
A culture of collaboration ultimately begins with the leadership team. According to leadership development consultant Susan Cucuzza, collaboration can turn into competition when it isn’t managed well. “Because collaboration consists of interdisciplinary groups trying to come together, intended collaboration can turn into whose idea is better, whose solution should be followed and who is smarter,” says Cucuzza. Having departmental leaders step up to oversee collaboration is a great start. Cucuzza argues that even informal or unofficial leaders can be a huge help in determining who needs to be involved, helping everyone understand the benefits of collaborating and identifying the overall goal.
A large part of understanding how departments fit together to achieve the organization’s mission is knowing what and how a department contributes to a process. Several companies that have gone through company-wide system updates strongly suggest “whiteboarding” their processes, or gathering teams and departments together to understand multi-department tasks. Extensively “whiteboarding” every process was helpful for two reasons:
Of course, it isn’t necessary to wait for a system overhaul to get to know the departments around the organization. Bringing teams together is a proactive way to give departments the opportunity to learn about each other and discover:
Conference meetings aren’t always the best way to communicate, and emails aren’t always the best method to exchange ideas. An enterprise content management (ECM) system can facilitate interdepartmental communication and collaboration by:
There’s no room for overly competitive departments bickering with each other in today’s competitive landscape. When departments cooperate to achieve organizational goals, tasks are completed faster and more efficiently, which can ultimately translate to a better customer experience.
If you’re an organization considering the move to cloud document management, you might be wondering about the differences between self-hosted and SaaS solutions. Some organizations want complete control over their software and hardware. Others prefer lower maintenance costs, pre-configured security features and automatic software updates.
Read on to see how SaaS and self-hosted solutions differ, so you can make a more informed decision on how to deploy a document management system for your organization.
SaaS offers customers access to software over the internet on a subscription basis, with the software hosted by the vendor or another third-party.
There’s no installation required, and resources such as servers or storage capacity can typically be scaled up automatically, or via a quick conversation with the SaaS vendor. On top of that, using SaaS generally means you don’t need to worry about the costs of maintenance, server space or hardware that you’d need if you were maintaining your own solution in-house.
Built-in security is also a particularly attractive benefit of SaaS products. The right vendor will have security controls already in place that are continually assessed, updated and improved to respond to the latest threats. Some vendors can also provide specialized security services to support compliance concerns and industry regulations, so customers have peace of mind that they’re abiding by the rules. Some of these features and services may include:
Software as a service platforms can also be well-suited for organizations wanting built-in business continuity measures. In many cases data stored in these solutions is replicated and encrypted in real time to multiple sites at different geographical locations, so if disaster strikes in one location, your data is safe and sound in others.
Especially as technology improves with vendors innovating on their platforms year after year, SaaS is proving to be a convenient and cost-effective solution for the modern enterprise.
Unlike a SaaS platform, where your back-end infrastructure is managed by experienced IT professionals outside your organization, these deployments offer ways for you to take more control of your hardware, software and updates. Organizations in certain industries, such as government or finance, may also be subject to certain regulations that restrict how they can store information, thus preventing them from deploying a SaaS solution for the time being.
However, a self-hosted solution can still be cloud-based, and therefore share some of the advantages of a SaaS platform. Let’s take a look at each of the self-hosted solution types.
Before cloud technology systems, on-premises deployments were the de-facto standard for document management. The most notable differentiator for this type of deployment is owning and maintaining hardware, and the need to manually deploy software updates. Here’s a look at advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages
Disadvantages
A self-hosted cloud deployment operates in largely the same way as an on-premises deployment with the exception of maintaining your own hardware. In fact, the applications themselves are the same and simply hosted on a vendor’s servers — most of the popular platforms, such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, allow you to run standard computer operating systems on them. Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages
Disadvantages
The first question you really need to ask is if you need control over the hardware itself. These days, SaaS solutions offer so many valuable benefits, like managed security, disaster recovery and automatic updates that they are a worthwhile choice unless you absolutely need to use your own hardware. Modern cloud applications offer flexibility without any of the hassle setting up hardware or paying for extra space, power or cooling for your server room. They can give your IT team extra time and resources to keep your business running smoothly.
To learn more about a document management solution that can be deployed as either an SaaS or self-hosted platform, take the Laserfiche Cloud product tour.
Related to lower revenues from what has been called the Great Recession, many states have cut funding to both K-12 and higher education, and even as the economy recovers and some of that funding is restored, education funding is still behind where it was before the recession. Consequently, schools are turning to technology to help them save money.
For example, 48 states—all except Alaska and North Dakota—are spending less per student on higher education than they did before the recession, with the average state is spending 23 percent less per student than before the recession, according to the Center for Budget Policy and Priorities, a Washington-based think tank focused on state and federal budget priorities.
In this cost-cutting environment, here are seven ways that schools are turning to technology to save money.
Reducing printing and paper use: A number of the “101 Smart Revenue Generators (and Money-saving Ideas)” from University Business involve eliminating paper processes for finance tasks such as employee reimbursements and refund processing, and introducing paperless alternatives such as electronic billing for tuition and online class registration. Document management can also help reduce paper use in accounts payable, as well as limiting printing in general. “If all entities that did business with the University of Houston System (UH) were paid via ACH, the university could save $100,000 per year,” notes UH president Renu Khator. Not only does this save money on printing supplies, postage, and paper, but it also can lead to the next item on our list…
Streamlining business processes: Some schools are hiring business process specialists to look for ways to make procedures more efficient. “The savings realized through the work of an analyst can more than pay for themselves,” reports eSchool News, especially when combined with a switch to electronic processes. Examples of processes that could be streamlined include purchase orders, payroll, and maintenance requests.
Special-purpose applications: Some schools are finding that they can save money through the use of applications intended to help them better manage food services, room use, utilities such as heating/cooling and electricity, textbooks, and school buses.
Everybody into the pool: Some districts save money by implementing shared services, pooling resources and having a single source for cloud technology, other IT services, and even administrative services such as secretarial.
Reducing the cost of communications: Schools can save money over the traditional phone-on-every-desk system. They can do this using technologies such as unified communications, voice over internet protocol (VOIP), and Skype, and business processes such as centralizing the purchasing and setup of communication technologies, According to eSchool News, 54 percent of school IT executives said the top benefit of unified communications was reducing operating costs, followed by increased productivity (50 percent) and more reliable communication (44 percent). In addition, some schools are finding that these technologies mean they can put a phone in every teacher’s room, which improves security.
Saving on computers: In some cases, schools are replacing computers because they were using Windows XP and were concerned about security risks now that Microsoft has stopped supporting that operating system. Some schools, such as St. James Catholic School in Gulfport, Miss., are taking the opportunity to move to Chromebooks, which are no-frills notebook computers that cost $200, as compared to a traditional desktop running Microsoft Windows, which generally cost about $1,000. Other school districts are saving money by buying refurbished computers instead of new ones. Refurbished computers can cost as little as one-third of new computers, eSchool News reports.
It’s true that investing in technology can result in some upfront expense, but in the long run, it can save on operational costs. Best of all, it can result in better educated students—and that’s the best investment of all.
When paper is used to manage invoices, AP might as well stand for “annoying process.” At best, hardcopy invoices cause a brief interruption in your day—at worst, they get lost on someone’s desk and you have to contact the vendor for a new copy.
Below are five telltale signs your AP process needs to be digitized and automated.
Tracking down the status of an invoice or purchase order (PO) feels like a days-long game of telephone. An employee inquires about an order, you defer to an employee in accounting, she asks the senior accountant…and eventually an answer arrives.
In a manual AP process, only the person with the document in hand knows its status. However, when an organization uses a document management system, any authorized user can view the status and activity of that document. With the added benefit of automation, employees can receive instant email notifications when an invoice requires attention—no searching required. The ability to independently locate and receive documents saves time and effort for you, your employees and your AP department.
A department head’s goal is to manage people, not paper. But when you have to scan, fax or walk every document to the AP department, you have less time to devote to your employees.
By converting all AP paperwork into digital files (or better yet, having them start off in a digital format), organizations avoid the nuisance of shuffling invoices and POs from desk to desk. Additionally, an automated AP system can calculate totals, cross-reference invoices with PO numbers and send notification emails to everyone involved in the process. The busy work is still getting done, but you don’t have to do it.
The time you spend routing and signing documents affects your employees’ productivity as well as your own. Anyone who submits a PO knows it could take days before the vendor even receives the order. You want your team to get what it needs to work, but that goal becomes more and more distant with every paper document that lands on your desk.
Instead of impeding projects, an automated AP process expedites the time between ordering and receiving. Not only does it eliminate the need to physically route documents, it also reduces the need for manual data entry, calculations and quality control. A document management system, for example, can extract information from an electronic PO or invoice and store it in a repository. Reduced manual transcription means reduced chance for data entry errors and processing delays.
Not every PO follows the same path from employee to vendor. POs typically require sign-off from different approvers depending on the dollar value of the order. Remembering who needs to sign what type of PO does not contribute to a quick and effortless process.
Another useful function of document management software is the conditional routing of documents. This type of system can determine, based on the information provided in the PO, whose approval is required. Once these conditions are established in the system, it can run thousands of times without error, giving you one less detail to remember about the AP process.
Signing paperwork is quick, but when an important document goes missing it pulls you away from work indefinitely. In the worst-case scenario, the invoice never resurfaces and those involved start to blame each other for its disappearance.
Document management software prevents this scenario in three major ways:
Through these measures, you’ll always know who has handled an invoice or PO at every stage of the AP process.
