Storing invoices digitally: 4 ingredients for an organized ‘virtual filing cabinet’

Every day or week you receive X number of purchase invoices. And as your organization grows, this number often increases rapidly. Are you still working with paper invoices? And do you store them in a physical archive? Then the processing takes a lot of time. And if you need to check an invoice, you can’t do it within a reasonable period of time. Because you have to work through all kinds of folders to find the answer to your question. Moreover, the fuller the cabinet, the less you can monitor the overview. You’ve heard that digitizing the process offers a solution. But how exactly does that work: storing invoices digitally?

From tax retention requirement to digital retention requirement

In the digital age, it makes sense to deal with an automation solution for purchase invoice processing. Practically every organization has now switched partially or completely to digital accounting. But if you want to keep invoices in a digital accounting system, you have to meet certain legal requirements. Are you going to keep invoices only digitally? Then it is compulsory – just as with paper archives – to keep every invoice and its communication for 7 years. For some invoices the retention period is even 10 years. You must ensure that all documentation has integrity and is legible. All data you retain must also be retrievable. If you switch to new hardware or software, make sure you transfer all saved data. If you can’t, find a way to access your old stored invoices (for example, by keeping an old computer and making sure you can open the files on it). Also keep in mind that you may transfer paper invoices to a digital storage medium only under certain conditions. For example, do you need to reproduce, make readable or review the converted data at a later time? Then you must be able to do this within a reasonable period of time. In short, when digitizing, you need to take into account various legal conditions. Do you want to save invoices digitally and are you curious about the legal ins and outs? Then read this download from the Internal Revenue Service. It is worthwhile to look into this carefully. Because if you meet all the conditions (i.e., you transfer the original invoices correctly and completely), you don’t have to keep these paper versions.

Saving invoices digitally: the benefits at a glance

You can access your digital invoices anytime, anywhere. Need to check an invoice? Then you can do this from any location. Handy at a time when working from home is becoming more and more common.
If you start saving invoices digitally, you will maintain an overview at all times. Want to view total project costs? Quickly pull up expenses over a certain period of time? Check exactly what expenses one specific department incurred last month? You can easily look it all up in your digital archive.
Audits are a lot easier. This is because the digital archive stores how the processing process went for each document. You can also see who performed which action. Because you can find the complete workflow here, audits take much less time.
Invoices can no longer get lost. All files are stored centrally in your virtual file cabinet. This enables efficient, simple document management.
Digital archive software tends to be flexible.If you ever switch to another ERP package, chances are your archive can simply migrate with it.

How do you build a virtual closet full of digital invoices?4 ingredients

1.Choose good scanning and recognition software

Want to store invoices digitally?Then you need to monitor the integrity of all documents. You lay the foundation for this with smart scanning and recognition software. This ensures proper recognition – not only of invoices received, but also of all related receipts and e-mails. Make sure this additional software links seamlessly with your ERP system. That way, you can process invoices automatically and avoid cumbersome work and unnecessary manual operations.

2. Ensure authenticity and callability

When storing invoices digitally, you must be able to prove that the stored documents are authentic. Therefore, when processing a purchase invoice, you should attach the pdf version as well as all associated receipts and e-mails to the entry. This way you guarantee the authenticity of the pdf document. Moreover, you have to make sure that all data – from invoice data to creditor data – are directly retrievable. It is advisable to think about this before creating a digital archive. In this way, you store data in a clean way, so your processes run cleanly. Good OCR software can help you with this.

3. Store your purchase invoices in one central location

It is important to keep all booked purchase invoices in one central place (in your ERP system). Keep everything manageable, so that you can retrieve a purchase invoice with all notes about it in no time, even 5 years from now. Many ERP systems offer options for this, but they are often limited or not so user-friendly. For ERP suppliers, purchase invoice processing is a peripheral process. If you want to save invoices digitally, additional software makes this a lot easier.

4. Make good backups

Your security is in excellent shape and you have taken various measures to prevent fraud and overcome phishing emails. Still, any system can crash. That is why it is essential that you make very good backups of your digital records. Only then can you store invoices digitally. However, this is easier said than done. Because creating reliable backups is a time-consuming, complex task. Fortunately, there is an alternative: a cloud solution that automatically takes care of all backups.