Digitize administration: 3-step plan to work more efficiently starting this summer!

Now that we have the first heat wave behind us and the summer months have officially arrived, it is time for many people to enjoy a well-deserved vacation. But when you close the office doors behind you for two, three or four weeks, you naturally want your administrative processes to continue running smoothly. You don’t want to have a huge pile of emails and invoices to process upon your return. How do you avoid a backlog and make sure your administration continues?

Why wait? Process optimization = peaceful vacation and return!

Those who keep digital records save a lot of time and costs. If you start processing purchase invoices digitally, productivity and efficiency also skyrocket. But some organizations prefer to postpone the switch to digital administration until the end of the year so they can make a fresh start in January. Understandable, but this means that you will continue working in a non-optimized way for another 6 months. Six months that you could actually much rather spend on non-repetitive, more challenging tasks that make you happy and add a lot of value to your business. And a digital invoice processing solution doesn’t have to cost much at all. It delivers so much that you’ll have the investment paid off in no time (good purchase invoice processing software can save you as much as 60% time!). In short, why wait for the close of the fiscal year? By digitizing your records now, you will enjoy the many benefits it brings, starting this summer. The rest of the year (and all subsequent years) you will of course also reap the benefits of this decision.

1. Automate the purchase invoice processing process with smart OCR software

Typing over invoice data is a repetitive and time-consuming task. If you have to manually update an invoice processing backlog after your vacation, you spend many hours doing so. And it only increases the risk of making a typo. Smart OCR software takes this task off your hands. OCR techniques ensure that elements such as invoice number, invoice date, VAT amount and creditor are recognized and converted into a reliable booking proposal. A smart OCR system goes a step further and actively detects errors on invoices. In addition, the software is self-learning, which means it gets smarter over time. The recognition rate is very high to begin with, but if the software does not immediately recognize the correct value, you can point it out to the digital document during the booking process. The system then makes a correction that it remembers. This makes the processing of digital purchase invoices increasingly efficient and faster. The sooner you implement an OCR solution, the sooner you start this process of saving more and more time!

2. Optimize the approval process by deploying a digital workflow

Often multiple employees must approve an invoice. You can, of course, send each invoice around by mail (or, worse, pass it by several desks on paper). But this slows down the process considerably. Especially during the summer vacations, when many people are away. Usually colleagues then temporarily take on extra tasks – and approving an invoice is not usually at the top of the priority list. More than once, this leads to invoices getting stuck or even lost. The solution to this problem is a digital workflow system. This ensures that invoices go through the digital route past the right people for approval. You can use built-in functions to ensure that invoices within a specific category are always automatically submitted to certain employees. When a document is ready for approval, your colleagues are notified. Approval is very easy: via desktop, laptop, tablet or phone, they can view and approve the invoice. Especially in these days of remote working, this makes the process much easier and more accessible. In addition, workflow software makes it much easier to reference an invoice: you retrieve it directly from your personal history, an overview of all invoices you have approved.

Choose a smart tool to always find an empty invoice mailbox

An overflowing invoice mailbox is the last thing you want to find after a relaxing vacation. Even after a weekend or a few days off, a mailbox full of purchase invoices is the number one annoyance among administrative employees. What if you always found an empty, orderly mailbox, so you could immediately start working on more important tasks that are more challenging for you? With a handy tool like the SMART Email Handler, your invoice mailbox always stays “clean” – even after vacations and weekends. While you’re laying by the pool or taking a walk on the beach, the tool combines, splits and redacts away to submit your incoming invoices to your OCR solution. If you want this process to be as optimal as possible, follow these 2 tips:

Ask suppliers to send invoices only to the invoice e-mail address, with any additional information you need to book the invoice quickly.
Have your colleagues also tell suppliers that they should always send invoices to the central e-mail address instead of to their contact person within the organization.

This way you make sure that all purchase invoices arrive in the same place, so you – with the help of the SMART Email handler – enjoy all the benefits of an empty invoice mailbox!

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Taking advantage of digital administration starting this summer?

Don’t want to put off process optimization for another six months and use the summer months to start working more efficiently? And would you like to discuss how you could implement the 3-step plan in this blog for your organization?

Back to overview

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