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6 Business Processes to Digitise

15th August 2023

Running your own business comes with many challenges, including planning, managing and executing certain tasks and processes. Regardless of the industry you work in, it's likely that specific processes are having detrimental effects on your level of efficiency and productivity, so how can you improve these processes? In this modern age, digitising documents and automating processes is a simple way to ensure an innovative business that's in touch with the times and the needs of their clients.

Cleardata is a highly-accredited document management company with many years' of experience in the industry. You'll always be able to rely on the trusted team at Cleardata to transform the following processes within your business to ensure operations run as smoothly and as efficiently as possible. This is because we are constantly able to perform a wealth of services that aim to digitise business processes, including:

1. Business expenses

Expenses of a business can prove to be a highly-inefficient process. As an important aspect of any company, it's important that this particular process is overhauled and digitised. It helps your employees to receive any money they're owed as quickly as possible.

Having physical documents and holding onto them for long periods of time increases the risk of losing receipts or innocently misplacing them. Not only this, but handfuls of receipts will have to be physically picked up and brought over to the accounts department where, again, receipts could get lost or misplaced.

Save a considerable amount of time and reduce the chances of lost documents by digitising the entire process. Cleardata will be able to scan these documents, ensuring they're sent to the relevant people. Also, as financial information is extremely sensitive, both for the employee and the company.

Not only will this digital process help to reduce the chances of receipts and/or invoices being lost, damaged or destroyed, but it will also cut the time it takes for employees to receive the money they're owed. Bundles of receipts won't have to be physically handed to the accounts department which saves time.

It will also make it easier for the accounts department to track. This then ensures that employees are reimbursed but it also prevents someone from submitting receipts twice, saving you money in the process.

2. Managing the accounts department

As already touched upon, the accounts department is responsible for executing a wide range of tasks, including reimbursing employees for any incurred business expenses. But along with that, they're also responsible for:

  • Ensuring everyone gets paid the right amount

  • Making sure that everyone is paid on time

  • Managing either incoming or outgoing invoices

Cleardata is able to help digitise these specific processes, regardless of the industry you work in. When it comes to invoice management, whether incoming or otherwise, this highly-experienced document management company are able to provide the following services to help with workloads:

With regards to managing payroll tasks and requirements, you'll be able to look to Cleardata to help with this also. Some of the services that'll help your accounts department to effortlessly deal with this particular side of things includes, but is not limited to, the following:

3. Scan-to-email processes

Ten years ago, scan-to-email capabilities were the height of paperless technology, but within that time, such technology has moved on. When documents are scanned in, it's not necessarily for the purpose of sending it in an email to another employee or client. With scanning abilities and processes advancing, document scanning can be used for a wide range of different reasons.

However, some items that are scanned still need to be sent in an email, so how can this, arguably, already-digitised process be made more efficient? Automation can help to make this process much quicker and easier to execute, helping to save time and money for all involved, no matter the industry you work in.

Quarterly reports for clients, for example, is a timely task, so why not make the scan-to-email process more efficient and allow for increased productivity by automating it? The time you save here could be better spent elsewhere in the company or by ticking things off your to-do list that you keep meaning to do that you never get around to.

4. The handling & processing of incoming documents

Incoming and outgoing mail can be difficult to manage and organise. Filtering out the important documents from junk mail, for example, can be a time consuming task, so this is a process that would benefit highly from digitisation. Digital mailroom services can help with this enormously and this too is available from the committed team at Cleardata.

Cleardata can always be counted upon to provide businesses throughout the UK with high-calibre document management services. With a dedicated, highly-skilled team at the helm of their operations you can rest assured that Cleardata will be on hand to meet all of your requirements and expectations when it comes to the managing, scanning and processing of documents, regardless of the industry you work in or the size of your company.

5. Invoice Processing

Using intelligent data capture, we're able to automatically extract data from invoices to allow for fast and efficient processing, data such as:

  • Invoice number

  • Amount

  • Purchase order

The information is then checked by our team and imported into your existing financial systems, saving time on data entry and increasing accuracy. Cleardata also offers an automated invoice exception handling service to help you:

  • Improve payment times

  • Reduce manual processing costs

  • Effectively handle invoicing peaks and troughs

Using intelligent data capture, invoices are checked for duplicates, missing data and discrepancies before being validated. If invoices do not coincide with your rules, they are marked as an exception and diverted to authorised employees for easy approval or rejection.

6. Managing your documents

How can Cleardata document management services improve accounts record management to support your accountants?

  • Create a paperless office and free up valuable space

  • Back-up and protect important accounting documents

  • Enable home working through records digitisation and securely storing using our cloud document management system

  • GDPR compliance - improve compliance by indexing records with clear retention dates

  • Document security and audit trail - restrict access to data by user, role or department and monitor activity with a full audit trail

  • Automated document and invoice processing - speed up invoice data capture and eliminate data entry errors.

Document scanning is another process that has naturally been digitised, and that many businesses from different industries can benefit from. Cleardata's secure scanning bureau digitises around 5 million images per month and is accredited to:

  • ISO27001:2022 for Information Security

  • ISO 9001 for Quality Management

  • BS 10008:2020 for Legal Admissibility of Electronic Information

We use the latest Kodak scanning technology and conduct a full quality checking process. Our service approach includes the following:

  • Collection throughout the UK

  • Full audit trail throughout the digitisation process

  • Access documents throughout the process using scan on demand

  • Accounting documents will be prepared by our team for scanning, removing all staples, paperclips and tags.

  • Intelligent preparation by document type - save time searching for information such as: invoices; purchase orders; claims; expenses; cheques; receipts

  • Optical Character Recognition (OCR) - OCR is applied to scanned account documents, allowing information to be searched quickly and easily using keyword search functionality. Save time, increase data accuracy and reduce costs

  • Data Indexing - Our team can index (digitally file) your documents to suit your business needs, such as data being indexed by client name, reference number and postcode. We can validate indexed data against existing databases to ensure it is correct. Rules and exceptions are agreed during project set up

  • Documents presented in any required format including PDF, JPEG or TIFF and digitally returned via SFTP, DVD, CD, USB or our cloud document management system

  • Following scanning, physical accounts records can be returned to your business, stored in our secure archive facility or destroyed by Cleardata using industrial shredding equipment. A certificate of destruction is provided

To learn more about our digital document management processes for any business, regardless of the industry you work in, contact us today on 0800 046 8081 or try one of our calculator tools.