Go paperless in your Accounts Payable department

There are many reasons why getting rid of paper in our day to day can be a good idea. In addition to the obvious environmental impact, we cannot forget the cost of maintaining our paper operations. Whether due to their storage, maintenance, inefficiency in finding required documents or simply due to the processing times in our system, companies need systems to avoid the bottlenect of maintaining physical media for their processes.

One of the first steps we can take to drastically reduce the use of paper is to improve the process of incoming invoices. Pending full implementation of electronic invoicing, each country has different legislation in this regard. Usually, the tax agencies of each country establish a series of measures to electronically preserve the documents, thus ensuring their correct reproduction and integrity.

Certified scanning

In Spain, certified scanning of invoices is the process that allows to replace physical copies for digital files legally equivalent to the original ones. This allows us to destroy paper immediately avoiding the aforementioned inconveniences.  To allow this process, the digital copy must meet a series of requirements stipulated by the tax agency. OpenText’s certified digitization solution, approved both by AEAT and by the provincial treasuries, allows us to easily dispense with paper, integrating it completely into our VIM Flow. To do this, it is necessary to meet the following conditions:

• Use an approved format, such as ISO 19005 PDF / A, PNG, JPEG 200, PDF o TIFF.
• Scan with a minimun resolution of 300 dpi.
• Incorporation of a digital signatura to the document.
• Add a time stamp.

Bearing in mind the above prerequisites, the digitization process will consisto f the following steps:

1. Scanner capture of the physical document. After receiving the invoice from our provider, we will scan through Enterprise Scan. The configuration in this software Will allow us to store day, time and scan user if necessary to more accurately ensure complete traceability.
2. After capture, the document data is extracted and indexed.
3. We then apply the meta data to the documents (date of creation, digitization, type of document, autor, agency, term of custody, etc.) required by the EAET and the provincial treasuries.
4. In the same flow, we apply the digital signature to the invoice. This signature must be issued by an authorized certifying entity and must be the name of a person in charge who will act as attorney-in-fact for the company.
5. After the inclusion of metadata and signature, we will proceed to file the document, ensuring that the retention is legally required and easily accessible if required by any regulatory entity.
6. Finally, it will be mandatory to have a time stamp that will ensure the integrity of the stored invoices.

All this process will be carried out automatically, reducing to the maximum human intervention that will be limited to feeding the scanner and processing the invoice once the flow reaches VIM.

By following these simple steps, we make sure to increase the efficiency in the digitization of invoices, contribute to reducing the times in the accounting of these and prevent our employees from falling into repetitive tasks of storing and searching for physical documents, allowing us to focus on tasks with greater value.

If you want to know more about this process, or you are thinking of implementing it in your company, do get in contact with us. We have implemented solutions to eliminate paper in more than 20 countries, and would love to help you.