In today’s technology-driven world, it seems that nothing is done by hand anymore. Formerly paper-based processes are driven by automation, and this includes your business's financial processes. Automated workflow has increased the efficiency, accuracy and visibility of departmental procedures, all while reducing the amount of paper your company uses. The benefits of automated workflow go far beyond just less clicking or hand-delivering documents. Here are some of them:
- Increased Accuracy: Do your invoices or other documents ever end up in the wrong hands or on the wrong desks? Is the information that you’re hand-keying sometimes incorrect? Human error is completely natural, but you can avoid some of it with automated workflow. When you set up rules within your financial system, like , your invoices and other documents are routed to the correct person and the information is read and indexed correctly every time. That means no papers getting lost in the shuffle or information being input incorrectly.
- Increased Efficiency: How much time do you spend in a week mailing, faxing, hand-delivering, emailing and managing paperwork? Think of what the time you spend mindlessly keying-in information could be allocated toward! An automated workflow does the heavy-lifting for you so that you can focus on crucial tasks and the workflow can take care of routing documents to the right places.
- Increase Visibility: When business processes are done by hand, it’s sometimes difficult to establish an accurate audit trail. Who handled which document and when is often lost. However, many solutions that offer automated workflow track when a document was touched, by whom and what was done with it. This gives you full visibility into financial processes to help prevent fraud and keep departments running smoothly.
- Decreased Paper Usage: Nobody likes having stacks of paperwork cluttering up their desks. Paper is destructible and easily misplaced. If your financial processes are automated, paper no longer needs to be passed from person to person, but goes through the approval process automatically. No more risk of lost documents!
- Decreased Costs: Paper and paper storage can get very expensive. If you add up the price of printing, copying, office supplies, postage, filing cabinets and the different kinds of paper that you have to purchase, it’s likely that you’re spending way too much on your paper processes. An investment in an AP automation solution can actually curb those costs by reducing, or even eliminating, your need for paper in the office.
Could an automated workflow process be what your company needs to get things done faster, more accurately and more cost-effectively?
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