We all have those menial tasks throughout the day that don’t make the best use of our skills and our time.
Going Paperless
You may find that paper is at the root of many of those tasks you have holding you back. Eliminating those tasks from your day, like filing, faxing, printing, copying, emailing, mailing, etc., would allow you to be more productive and spend your time on more pressing issues. Though most are able to admit that going paperless would save their company significant amounts of time and money, we still find an attachment to paper and a fear of having to learn a new process.
Automation
Instead of re-inventing the wheel, let’s take your current processes and just add a little automation.
Let’s focus on accounting for the sake of simplicity. Each day AP gets a stack of invoices in the mail that they will then have to sort through, copy, file, and walk copies over to the people who will need to approve them. In a paperless world, that AP clerk would scan all of the paper invoices when they come in and work with a digital stack of documents instead.
When it comes to the approval process, someone picks up each of those paper documents to review the information, signs their approval and walks it over to someone who will enter that data before it makes its way to the file cabinet. The electronic alternative would be sending the documents to an approver’s workflow queue where they can hit a button to apply an approval “stamp” to the document. When it gets sent back to AP, the data entered will be re-purposed as search values to make it easy to find the document next time it’s needed.
Make It Easier
The process is basically the same. It just takes place digitally rather than on a physical document. The benefits of the electronic process are the continual visibility and the possibilities for automation. Documents created electronically will be automatically stored in the repository eliminating the need for filing. They can be routed automatically based on the data contained in the document and configurable email alerts can ensure that each document gets processed on time. Throughout the entire process, anyone with the proper security rights can find the document they need, check its status, and view a full history with the auditing capabilities.
Don’t be afraid to let go of the things you have gotten familiar with. You don’t have to step too far out of your comfort zone and the benefits you’ll experience are extremely valuable.