Maintaining of Paper Invoice Bill by Small Business by Mani Malarvannan

In all business whether it is big or small the different account process to handle the bill payment and invoices are nearly same. This account process is of two types: account payable and account receiving. Since these account process deals with cash flow so it should be handle carefully. In this generation Y there is several technologies like online bill payment, electronics invoicing which helps to removes the tedious paper work. But practically till today it has helped but cannot remove the paper work fully.Even today 80% of the invoice come in paper in small business" says the Aberdeen Group research report Different companies like Kofax, ReadSoft, AnyDoc and Abbyy developed data capture solutions for converting all the paper based invoices, checks, bills, and other documents into data to sent to the accounting or ERP systems. Large companies are using this software to increase the efficiency of the account department and they are successful in it. They have made productive gain in the accounts department. But small company can not use this software. Instead they do the maximum work manually. They use software only to scan their paper containing accounts documents. This is not a cost-effective solution. Reason for which small businesses are not using automatic account data capture software Most important reason is cost of this software is high. So small business firm cannot bear it. Not only buy this software but you have to also bear the cost of 1. Licensing Fee for the software (User based or CPU based access) 2. Hardware upgrade to install the software 3. Training for your employees 4. Software support and maintenance This Software may not be suitable for the interface used by you. Then you again have to change the interface to suit the software. Invoice bill , checks comes in different size and shapes. Important documents like customer name, address, amounts are written at different places in the paper documents. Now if the paper documents contain hand written notes then it may create problem for the software as it may not scan the data properly. Vendors still embraced OCR and ICR technologies into their product to capture the account data accurately from the scanned images. So there is a long way to go to remove manual entry.

Small business must use offshore outsource vendor for different account processes. They can use their existing infrastructure to send the data securely through internet to offshore location to get process by offshore vendor. For more details read Cybelink Secure BPO Using an offshore provider will not change the process of management in the accounts department of the small business. Only change is per scanned images will be converted to accounting software or ERP system After receiving the scanned images, following are the typical tasks performed by the offshore vendor. * 1. Use automated and manual process to extract all the data like invoice number, invoice date, and check number from the images. * 2. Hardware upgrade to install the software * 3. Enter extracted data to small business accounts software * 4. Perform other accounting operations like Invoice preparing, Bill payment, and Check Printing in the small business account software. * 5. Export the work from the accounting software to a file. * 6. Send the file to the small business to import it into their accounting software for verification. After receiving the finished files from the offshore vendor, small business companies can import it into their accounting or ERP systems for verification and further processing it. Cost of paper document reduces by 50% if this off shoring is done. Small businesses need to overcome issues like offshore security and offshore outsourcing cultural issues. But by carefully managing their offshore vendors' small businesses can gain the cost reduction and operational efficiency in their accounts payable and account receivable operations. s

About the Author

Mani Malarvannan is cofounder of Cybelink, a company specializes in small business financial and accounting outsourcing like Bookkeeping, Tax, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, etc. For more info visit www.cybelink.com