By Joan Honig, DocuWare – How you store your accounting documents has a huge impact on your ability to plan ahead. When documents are difficult to retrieve — or go missing — it creates serious problems in the event of a future audit and limits your ability to produce detailed cost analyses and plan budgets. Effectively managing accounting documents to meet legal and regulatory requirements should be a core priority for every accounting department.
Our safe archiving technology supports this effort by preserving documents and data that enable your organization to better track accounts payable, accounts receivable, operational and capital expenses and cash flow. Accurately indexing these documents makes them easily searchable for speedy retrieval. Clearly defined access rights, stringent information organization and advanced security support strict compliance initiatives such as GDPR, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley simplify retention policy enforcement for sensitive documents. Using a document management system to store accounting documents enables an accounting department to develop better data controls in these five ways:
- Preparing for audits:If you have a paper-based system, an audit is often an ordeal for your accounting department as well as for the auditors. Is this scenario familiar? An auditor asks to see all your invoices from 2017, for instance, so you’d give them access to your physical file cabinets. Then the auditor sits in a room and wades through the paper documents. With a document management system, your accounting department is better prepared for an audit because documents can be retrieved instantly by search criteria that you define. This enables your team to respond quickly to auditor requests and maintain greater control over your business information. Every document capture, version and annotation are logged for complete traceability, and every workflow step is recorded for process transparency.
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SOURCE DocuWare
