A common theme is business is that labor is by far your greatest cost, and, as a cost, holds the most significant potential for revenue generation. That is because your employee's time is valuable and they are the means of income generation for your company. Using their time effectively is critical to maximizing that potential without increasing cost. One way that you can achieve gains regarding employee production is by implementing an invoice scanning system. Here are three significant ways that invoice scanning can save your business time and money.
1. OCR is a real thing, and it works
OCR, or optical character recognition, is a technology that almost feels like it belongs in a sci-fi movie. After all, the technology more or less means that the computer reads the document and extracts pertinent data. The good news is that it is real and can be extremely effective at streamlining your workflow when dealing with documents, in this case, invoices. When you scan an invoice and your copier or back end software uses OCR then, it will pull out the information that you need and dump it into your workflow system. This change alone can save hundred of hours of data entry over a year that is an immediate cost saving.
2. Virtual Filing Systems
When you scan a file, you gain the ability to interact with it within the computer. Most computers now have memory capabilities that rival a million filing cabinets. By scanning your documents through your copier and either into your hard drive or a records management system, you can store documents in a much cheaper way and save real estate in your office.
3. Speed
The largest time saver of all is buried in the fact that computers can process faster than we can. As long as your company uses a consistent naming convention and there are digital workflows in place to save data you should always be able to find the document you are seeking in seconds rather than the minutes it may take sifting through a filing cabinet for your invoice. These gains move directly to your bottom line.
Scanning is the best way
Some people may still prefer a physical copy to interact with (and that is ok!) but scanning your files instead of physically storing them, entering the data from them, and handling them is nearly a no-brainer.