By David Guilbault, Director, Customer and ISV Development, ImageTag Read this article at MSDynamicsWorld.com Let’s examine what a document imaging system can do for your accounting department. You’ve implemented Microsoft Dynamics GP, NAV or AX and it’s easier and more efficient to manage your business from a financial perspective. You’re running standard and ad-hoc reports, tracking and managing your suppliers; integrated billing and fixed assets tracking is a cinch. While you’ve simplified accounting processes maybe you discovered inbound documents that drive these processes are utterly disconnected from your Microsoft Dynamics system. You also may be inundated with an array of paper and other electronic documents that are related to business transactions but filed separately. Most likely, you can blame the age-old invoice process. What is the real cost to process an invoice?
A 2008 International Accounts Payable Professionals survey revealed the average cost to process a single invoice falls between $8 and $10. Manual document handling and data entry processes were responsible for 70% of these costs. Throughout the invoice process, paper is everywhere from the originating request, to the purchase order, invoice and payment. Chances are your costs are not limited to just invoice processing. How much time would you spend if you needed access to all the documents related to a single business transaction? No matter how you look at it, costs are involved, and they add up fast. If you are touching paper and other electronic documents through any of your accounting processes, document imaging should probably be on your radar. Integrate paper processing into your digital business strategy
If manual paper processing is consuming your accounting staff’s time, you can integrate it into your overall digital business processes. See how document imaging systems can improve productivity and reduce costs by: - Reducing time spent manually filing, sharing and retrieving documents
- Eliminating lost and/or misfiled documents
- Enhancing customer and employee satisfaction by minimizing response time to inquiries
- Simplifying the dissemination and sharing of information with other users, departments, and locations
- Minimizing time to research compliance and regulatory requirements
- Providing a mechanism for disaster recovery and data protection
- Reducing office space requirements by eliminating the need to store physical documents
What your document imaging system should do for your business
Find the document imaging system that will work best for your business and ensure it meets these 10 truly useful document imaging system criteria: - Work inside Microsoft Dynamics GP, NAV or AX within the familiar screens employees use every day
- Link paper or electronic documents automatically to a transaction at the point of receipt
- Allow batch scanning where and when it’s convenient, including from a digital copier
- Manage multiple-page documents whether in paper or electronic formats such as email, Word, or PDF
- Enable quality control checks to automatically alert users of a missing a document or lost page
- Allow searching by transaction-related data or by content within the document
- Not create more paper by requiring cover sheets but allowing them where useful
- Enable or limit shared access by authorized personnel
- Provide a document storage repository and/or support your SharePoint repository
- Fit your organization’s rules for records management and compliance
Last but not least, your solution should have potential for large-scale adoption. Look for an enterprise-class system that supports other functions within the organization. This ultimately makes the solution more cost effective. Summing it all up
Manual invoice processing is expensive. If you’re manually filing, retrieving, and sharing documents, you should consider an imaging system especially if those documents are creating chaos or consuming scarce resources in your organization. The right document imaging system can create order and provide a new level of productivity. The imaging solution you choose should integrate with your Microsoft Dynamics application. It should be simple, productive, and support the demands of your accounting department while offering enough flexibility to support your entire organization, too. See KwikTag in Action About the Author:
David Guilbault is Director, Customer and ISV Development for ImageTag, where he is responsible for managing customer and partner relationships, as well as insuring their success with their KwikTag solution. Previously, David headed Product Management at ImageTag, where he was instrumental in transforming a patented idea into a software platform that is applicable to every document, user and business. Prior to joining ImageTag, David spent eight years with Xerox. This tenure gave him an inherent knowledge of documents and their importance to an organization. With more than two decades in technical sales, systems engineering and product management, David has invaluable expertise in helping customers streamline their business processes using technology. David is a U.S. patent holder with a degree in Computer Science from University of Southern Maine. Read more document imaging columns by David Guilbault | 
