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 www.cybelink.com
Can Small Business Company Maintain Their Paper Based Invoice and Bill?
The main two types of accounting process i.e. accounting payment and accounting receiving are always same. It doesn’t matter to the size of the company. Since this process deals with cash so it should be treated with extra care. Though in this generation there are lot of modern gadgets like online bill payments, which save the company’s employees from long tiresome paper work for making invoice but it could not remove it totally. “Still today 80% invoice is done on papers” says the Aberdeen Group research report. This count is more for small business.
Features of Account Data Capture Software
Account Data Capture Software developed by different companies like Kofax , ReadSoft , AnyDoc and Abbyy converts all the paper based invoices, checks, bills, and other documents into data to sent to the accounting or ERP systems. This software has really increased the efficiency of the accounts department of big companies. But small company cannot use this software because of its price and other problems which a large company can bear.
Reason for which small businesses are not using automatic account data capture software
Beside Software cost other factors are:
1. Software License fee (User based or CPU based access)
2. Hardware upgrade for proper interface
3. Employee training
4. Maintenance and support of Software
You should have proper interface to run the software. So you have to check your system by the vendor. Moreover if scanning is done from hand made documents on the scanned paper then error may occur. Vendors still embraced OCR and ICR technologies into their product to capture the account data accurately from the scanned images. Thus there is a long way to go to remove manual entry.
Remedy for Small business companies
These companies can outsource their data securely through Internet to different offshore vendors for different account process. For more details on read Cybelink Secure BPO
Main advantage is we can use existing infrastructure to do all this. Even these companies donot have to change their way of management. Only change is per scanned images will be converted to accounting software or ERP system
After receiving the scanned images, some typical tasks performed by the
offshore vendor which are listed below:
1. Using automated and manual process to extract all the data
2. Hardware upgrade to install the software
3. Insert this extracted data to small business accounts software
4. Perform other accounting operations like Invoice preparing, Bill payment
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.
Small business companies can import the finished files into their accounting or ERP systems for verification. Cost of the paper document reduces by 50% if offshore vendors are given for accounting process. Small businesses need to overcome issues like like offshore security and offshore outsourcing cultural issues . Thus by effective cost small companies can also get valuable services.
Tags: Based, Bill, Business, Company, Invoice, Maintain, paper, Small, Their