Management of Paper-Based Invoices and Bill in small Business Companies?

by: Mani Malarvannan

Both big or small business must always deal with accounts processing to handle their invoices and bill payments. As this processes deals with cash flow of the company it must be managed properly with full concentration. In this millennium there are modern equipments like online bill payment, electronic invoicing, and P-card are available that remove the paper based processing from the accounting department. But the fact is these technologies may reduce the paper documents but cannot remove it. According to Aberdeen Group research report research report 80% of invoices come in paper format which increases as the company goes smaller and smaller

Utility of Account Data capture Software

Several companies like Kofax , ReadSoft , AnyDoc and Abbyy manufactures data capture solutions specifically developed to convert all the paper based documents into data to sent to the accounting or ERP systems. Large corporations have seen its utility which has increased efficiency of their accounting departments and achieved significant productivity gain in processing their accounts payable and accounts receivable data. Small business cannot afford the cost of the software. Most of the small companies use software just to scan their paper based accounting documents and manually enter the accounting data into their accounting or ERP system.

Reason for not using Account Data capture software

Beside the cost of the sophisticated software other utilities are


* 1. Licensing Fee for the software (User based or CPU based access)
* 2. Hardware upgrade to install the software
* 3. Training for your employees
* 4. Software support and maintenance

Thus it becomes unbearable for small company to buy this software. Moreover your accounting or ERP system must have a compatible interface with the software otherwise it may not run. Sometimes the software couldn't identify the scanned hand made documents for which sometimes your have to work manually. Software vendors embraced OCR and ICR technologies into their product to capture the account data accurately from the scanned images, they're still long way to go to remove the manual process. So still a long way to go to remove manual work.

Thus big companies using an account data capture solution can affordable it and they can justify the cost of managing it. But for small companies it is not an affordable solution and their in-house manual process is not cost-effective and efficient.

So what is the way ouy from here?

Outsourcing to different offshore vendors help a lot to get account processing documents converted to your account or ERP systemThey can use their existing infrastructure to send the data to offshore location securely through Internet to be processed by the offshore vendor. For more details on how the process works read Cybelink Secure BPO They don’t have to change their unique way of management of accounts department

Only change is instead of small business personnel offshore vendor is responsible for converting all the account data from the scanned images to the accounting software or ERP system.

After receiving the scanned images, following are the typical tasks performed by the offshore vendor.

* 1. Use automated and manual process to extract all the data like invoice number, invoice date, and check number from the images.
* 2. Hardware upgrade to install the software
* 3. Enter extracted data to small business accounts software
* 4. Perform other accounting operations like Invoice preparing, Bill payment, and Check Printing in the small business account software.
* 5. Export the work from the accounting software to a file.
* 6. Send the file to the small business to import it into their accounting software for verification.

Once they receive the finished files from the offshore vendor, they can import it into their accounting or ERP systems for verification and further processing it.

Small businesses can achieve several benefits from using offshoring accounts payable and accounts receivable services; cost of processing their paper documents will decrease by 50% to 60%. The cost saving does not come free, small businesses needs to overcome issues like offshore security and offshore outsourcing cultural issues. But by carefully managing their offshore vendors small businesses can gain the cost reduction and operational efficiency in their accounts payable and account receivable operations.

About The Author

Mani Malarvannan is cofounder of Cybelink, a company specializes in small business financial and accounting outsourcing like Bookkeeping, Tax, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, etc. For more info visit http://www.cybelink.com