How to get the most out of your Invoice Storage Processing

Move away from Traditional Paper Storage

The biggest and perhaps one of the most common solutions to handle your invoice storage is to simply digitize your records. Paper can be a real pain to sort and search through, and not only does it take up office space, but it causes your employees to have to move around the office as well. This not only can create a lot of disruption, but it takes more time out of each employee’s schedule to go move to a specific destination to do a manual search. This doesn’t even factor in that paper files can simply go misplaced, damaged or go missing all together.

By digitizing your storage system, your employees can remain stationary while all having access to documents and files. Additionally, the process of finding a file becomes significantly easier as you can easily search by name and department through a couple easy words. With your storage being digitized, you can also have backup measures in place to recover files, significantly reducing the risk of lost, damaged, or missing documents.

Automate Invoice Processing

Document Management allows for automation, and this implies invoice processing as well. This is a critical step to how you can securely and effectively safeguard your documents. Full invoice processing automation ensures a streamlined, defined workflow from data capture to payment and accounting system integration, while securely storing all documents in a central, accessible repository for collaboration and efficient retrieval.

Additionally, automated invoice processing can provide automated backups, and audit trails. So, your business is in the know on every process every step of the way. Your business is also able to add security measures through document management, such as assigning user permission and limiting what departments have access to what files within the system. As a result, your business will have full control over sensitive data and be able to monitor the processing from start to finish.

Creating a Standard Naming Convention

Having a naming convention really helps, in your organization, locating files quickly and keeping workflow organized. This allows other employees and users who need to look up invoices to be able to do so, quickly and efficiently. How a naming convention should be defined should be a company discussion, something that the business agrees on and follows. There would be no purpose if every employee followed a different naming convention, so settling on one that can be used company-wide will produce the best results and avoid unnecessary confusion.

Here are a few best practices to consider when planning for these naming conventions:

Use descriptive names, but keep things short and brief

Have some unique indicator in the name, such as the invoice number

Be consistent with your naming, for example settle on one format for doing dates

Avoid using spaces and special characters when possible, doing these can cause the documents to become extremely hard to look up and find.

Utilize metadata for easy lookup

When a document is indexed on a document management system, it is assigned metadata. This is particularly useful because metadata will include information such as the customer's name, creation date, document type, and various keywords that are used to classify the file. This makes searching for the file easier, as just knowing one metadata element will be enough to significantly filter down the documents to the result you are looking for within the system.

This makes invoice lookup very useful, because you will be able to look up, for example, all invoices tied to a specific customer. Or you may be able to pull up a list of invoices that were made in a select amount of date ranges. It allows for so much flexibility and becomes very useful if your company is looking for data trends and patterns when analyzing invoices.