Document Projects. Marketing & Customer Communications Management

Accelerate Accounts Payable with Workflow & Image Software October 16, 2008

Automating your Accounts Payable processes through the use of imaging and workflow software can bring a set of benefits that enables finance departments to reduce and contain costs whilst improving overall process efficiency and reliability.

For this, you’ll need a scanning device, imaging software, electronic archival and retrieval system and business process management or workflow software.

The notion is essentially that incoming invoices are imaged and OCR read. From the OCR reading, it should be possible to pick up data that indicates who the supplier is and thus how the document needs to be routed.

Once the document has been identified, the workflow is then able to route documents into the work queue of the person who should be processing the document. Once the document has been processed, that process step can be ticked off and then handed off to a query and / or authorisation process.

The fact that the system organises the work and that the paper is taken out of the process greatly accelerates the amount of work that an individual can complete. It also ensures that nothing is forgotten about or lost thus ensuring process reliability.

Most workflow applications have software that will allow annotating of documents so that its history can be understood and resolution to queries can be made more effectively. Because the document has been placed in the archive and retrieval system, should there be a query in the future , the document can be quickly recalled without the need to resort to digging deep within a physical archive storage facility.

If you try to ensure that the archive and retrieval is records management standards compliant, this archive can serve as a ‘legal’ archive so that once a document is archived, the paper can be destroyed (you may want to time manage this).

Workflow and Image systems exist for all types of market segments. A little web searching should find you plenty of vendors who can help.