Why are our finance teams still so busy?

If you’re a business, charity or government organisation, you’re very likely to use some kind of accounting software.

You’ll have an on-premises or cloud-based solution that you may be able to customize to meet your requirements. You may even have your own completely bespoke in-house solution.

Whichever it is, accounting software is now a standard piece of the business toolset and vital for financial management tasks such as monitoring and managing cash, orders, invoices and payments.

Originally, financial management software developed to automate manually intensive financial tasks so that finance personnel or busy managers could do more productive work.

Tasks such as preparing and distributing reports to a preset list of recipients, making recurring payments and reconciling general ledger reports and bank statements are among the many accounting tasks that can be performed automatically by most accounting software applications.

There’s no doubt that accounting software has achieved what it set out to do. So why are the folks in accounts still so busy?

The fact is that while we’ve automated and simplified many process-based accounting activities, there are still many document-based accounting activities that are manually intensive and time-consuming.

The fact that we still send invoices out to clients asking for payments means that documents generated by the accounting system must still be physically produced, and sent digitally or even posted.

After that, they need to be filed, archived and available for easy retrieval.  At the same time, incoming documents must also be associated with an account, transaction or person and be accessible centrally.

How can these manually intensive document-based accounting activities be automated?

The answer lies not in perfecting already very good accounting systems but in highly specialised add-ons that integrate with them – such as Zetadocs. 

Electronic invoicing

When your accounting system tells you that your clients owe you money, the process of generating and sending hundreds, thousands – possibly - of invoices can be a daunting and time-consuming task. It can be made easier by electronic document delivery software that gives you the possibility to send all these invoices in one single batch, with personalized branded emails

Collections management

Sometimes customers query invoices by letter or email. The incoming document needs to be stored with other relevant documents relating to the customer account or transaction, which is difficult if your accounting system is software-based. Capturing incoming documentation, associating it with a transaction and then storing it electronically for easy retrieval saves a huge amount of time and effort. You can watch a demo of this process here. 

Sales order processing & Purchase order processing

Like customer queries, orders can arrive in any format. The difficulty lies in converting the documents to a single format and associating them with a pre-existing entity on the system.  Once captured, they can be transferred to the right department for processing and dragged and dropped into the accounting system for archiving alongside other relevant documents.

Benefits?

If all information and documents are captured and stored centrally and alongside relevant customer records, staff in accounts, sales, purchasing, warehouse and management can all retrieve the relevant information relating to a transaction.

Transactions can be completed quickly, documents delivered efficiently and customer queries handled effectively.

Now that should ease the burden on the finance team.

We also offer Zetadocs Express for free for up to four users within an organization, you can register for free access here.  Alternatively, you can also view our other apps available on AppSource here.

Editors Note: This post was originally published in May 2011 and has been revamped and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.