As you spend your time reviewing and analyzing data and making decisions that positively impact your organization’s financial health, you’re probably looking for ways to cut costs. Implementing new tools and strategies to fix your inefficient everyday tasks is a great place to start.
Document management, with its capabilities extending far beyond basic document storage, is an underutilized but key contributor to aid your efforts to reduce costs.
1. Reduce Storage & Other Material Costs
Without a document management system, file storage can generally be divided into two different categories: paper and digital. Both of these can incur significant costs for finance teams.
Paper Documents
Finance teams dealing with the seemingly never-ending supply of documents have to put them somewhere. Traditionally, they have been printed off, stored, and filed away in filing cabinets across the office.
This requires a lot of physical space and materials just to store documents. Plus they need to be easily accessible at a moment’s notice, especially in the event of an audit.
Digital Documents
Most finance or accounting departments have made the switch from paper to electronic documents. While that clears up some of the overhead, they still present certain operating costs that have to be dealt with.
Not all digital documents are created equally. Digital files in their simplest form still often require your employees to go to the office to securely access them on a server. You’re still required to rent an office space and have to face many of the same document challenges that physical documents present. For example, you may still print off documents so you can easily share and analyze them with your colleagues, which is driving up your costs.
Working with the right digital documents on a document management system can greatly reduce these costs by storing them on the cloud. This will keep them accessible to those that need them to perform document-centric processes from anywhere.
Document accessibility can be one hindrance to working remotely. So cloud-based document management allows you to cut down on the costs of renting out a large space by still making your documents accessible to all those who need them.
2. Decrease Unnecessary Labor Costs
With traditional technology, finance teams often get caught up in the redundancies of manual work. Not only is having to resort to performing repetitive processes day in and day out inconvenient, but it also forces finance professionals to put their time and energy towards things that don’t contribute to an organization’s overall goals.
Take searching for a misplaced document, for example. Locating a misfiled expense report may move to the top of your to-do list because when you need it, you really need it. That means countless labor hours have to be devoted to that instead of making informed financial decisions based on your data.
How is this different with document management? With the right document management system, you can implement advanced search capabilities into your workflow. That means even if a document has been misfiled or mistitled, you can use full-text search to find any document in an instant.
3. Streamline Accounts Payable and Receivable
Since accounts payable and accounts receivable track every dollar going in and out of your business, it’s one of the first places to watch when you’re making an effort to reduce costs. Inefficient AP/AR can disrupt your business’s operations, preventing you from having a positive cash flow.
Document management provides you with the opportunity to streamline and automate your AP/AR so you can process your payments faster and more accurately.
Accounts Receivable
Using document management’s automated workflows, you can solely focus on processing your payments from your customers. With its automated routing, your team can get in the money faster and avoid any hiccups that happen in a manual document process environment.
Accounts Payable
On the accounts payable side, you can ensure that your payments are done error-free and on time. With document management, your processes don’t have to get held up because of manual processes. Using document management to automate your accounts payable process will help you avoid incurring any late fees and maintain a good relationship with your vendors.
4. Create Error-Free Work
Certain errors in the workplace can set back hours of hard work and require extensive hours of labor to fix the mistake. Specifically, errors involving data within documents can set off completely incorrect workflows that will have to be completely redone, which will come with a high cost. Errors can often cause compliance issues that come with hefty fines.
Fortunately, document management can help finance teams avoid human error, and cut down on the cost of repeating incorrect processes. Document management has many different capabilities that can help you avoid costly mistakes.
- Fill out forms completely—Document management can ensure that you’ve filled out every required field before it lets you move onto the next step.
- Get all the required approvals and signatures—Document management can automatically route documents to the required approver or signer and send regular reminders until it has been completed.
- Include all the files needed for a particular process—With intelligent organization and advanced findability features, you can locate any necessary document at a moment’s notice.
- Extract and transcribe data points accurately—Document management has automated data extraction that will turn the data into usable information for workflows and other uses.
- Keep all documents protected—Customizable permissions and security measures ensure that all documents are protected and follow strict compliance standards.
Thanks to document management, you can spend more time analyzing your financial data and adding value to your organization instead of fixing a preventable mistake.
Get Started With Document Management
Document management is one key piece of the tech stack for those in finance and accounting departments. Not only will it cut down on costs, but it will help teams stay organized and establish efficient workflows.
Revver offers significant functionality for finance teams looking to improve their processes. If you’re ready to experience that efficiency lift, discover Revver today.
