Sales order processing best practice – are you only seeing half the picture?

When we first announced the availability of Zetadocs for NAV back in 2007, we communicated our vision to help finance departments eliminate the costs associated with the production and storage of paper documents.  This aim was to deliver against our tagline “Capture. Deliver. Share” and to create the most comprehensive suite of document management solutions for NAV.

Harnessing our experience as a supplier of electronic communications software, the first release of Zetadocs for NAV focussed on delivering electronic documents natively from within NAV.  We integrated our solution with Microsoft SharePoint to enable automatic archiving and on-screen retrieval of sent documents.

Initial market feedback was very positive with customers and partners appreciating the opportunity to save money by emailing NAV reports as PDFs and to save time by sending batches of documents all at once with a single mouse click.

SharePointless

Despite the popularity of electronic document delivery, customers were initially less enthusiastic about electronic document archiving, despite the clear potential benefits of instant document retrieval and the ability to replace paper filing cabinets.  They generally agreed that manual filing and retrieval was an inefficient and time-consuming process that involved inconvenient journeys to both store and retrieve physical documents.

Closer scrutiny revealed that the most popular application for Zetadocs was for use within the sales order process – with finance teams choosing to replace the dated practice of printing paper invoices, folding them, and putting them into envelopes to be mailed to their customers.

Half the picture

But the value of electronic archiving could not be fully realised for the sales order process if we were only capable of storing sales invoice documents in a SharePoint database for onscreen retrieval.  Such a solution was only capable of helping with half the picture, since dispute resolution or audit purposes required copies of other supporting documents such as any quotations, the sales order itself and goods received notes.  Typically, however, these documents were located elsewhere - often in a paper filing cabinet - meaning users had to go looking in two places if they wanted the full document audit trail.

Capture is essential

We delivered the next phase of our vision in 2010 with the release of Zetadocs Capture.  Zetadocs Capture - when combined with Zetadocs Delivery - enabled finance teams to realise many more of the benefits of electronic document archiving, including the ability to capture inbound documents and store them electronically within the same customer file.

This release heralded a new phase of maturity for the Zetadocs for NAV solution.  The Zetadocs “electronic staple” ensured documents that were part of the same sales order were presented as if they would be in a paper file, but with the benefits of secure onscreen retrieval from within NAV or a web browser.

Microsoft endorsement

Customers and partners welcomed the new addition to the family and the popularity of Zetadocs accelerated and interest grew exponentially.  A year later, we partnered with Microsoft to create our foundation edition, Zetadocs Express, which is available to any NAV customer with a current Business Ready Enhancement Plan (BREP).  Zetadocs Express combines delivery of NAV reports as a PDF by email with drag and drop document capture and has been downloaded over 4,500 times.

To learn more about the benefits of combining Zetadocs Capture with Delivery, join one of our webinars or find out more about our sales order processing solution.