Virtually every company relies on selling. Whether products or services – and sometimes both – purchase payments are the lifeblood that keeps business pumping. But what is often overlooked is how important back-end activities are to business growth and success. Accounting departments oversee purchasing responsibilities, and without efficient, accurate bookkeeping, business would not survive. If collections weren’t accurately recorded, it would look like they never happened at all. The key to creating a productive Accounting department is to develop a strategy that allows staff to route, track and review business-critical data easily, efficiently, and with minimal resources.
As the leading small-business accounting software, Intuit’s QuickBooks is a user-friendly tool to help Accounting staff manage invoices, purchase orders, and other payables data. Now imagine that by integrating QuickBooks with an advanced document management system, also known as Enterprise Content Management (ECM), organizations can take Accounting practices to the next level. Let’s take a look at how syncing data between these systems can streamline the most common – and complex – Accounting tasks:
1. Accurate Bookkeeping – Every transaction at your organization needs to be recorded. Regardless of the amount of paperwork coming in – from checks, vouchers, delivery tickets and more – a manual data entry process is not the most efficient. With advanced capture automation technology, document management software digitizes bookkeeping for streamlined, more precise processing. Users can extract significant data such as customer name, PO number, date, quantities, costs, etc. and index each document accurately into the system for effortless retrieval. In addition, all this data is automatically synced directly to QuickBooks, eliminating photocopying and duplicate data entry. With all accounting documentation accurately organized and easily accessible, reporting is enhanced as approving managers gain direct access to the documents and their business-critical data from within either platform.
2. Invoice Management – When it comes to cashflow, the importance of an efficient billing process cannot be understated. The quicker your business can get invoices to customers, the sooner you will be paid. When you integrate QuickBooks with an ECM system, data is entered once and automatically shared between both applications. Through a scan or simple drag and drop, users can capture Accounting documents, like invoices or purchase orders, into the ECM software, which will then automatically extract the data and push it through to QuickBooks for automatic bill creation. Eliminating manual data entry, staff can ensure the bill is sent in a timely manner and purchase data is accurate. Through automated bill creation, Accounting departments can set automatic email reminders to invoice customers sooner and reduce Days Sales Outstanding (DSO).
3. Vendor Payments – At the end of the month it’s important to review not only payments received, but payments made. Successful Accounting departments must have the ability to quickly locate and review past-due receivables as well as unpaid bills to avoid payment penalties. By integrating an Accounting system with document management software, staff can perform database lookups directly from within the QuickBooks application. There is no need to enter search criteria because the open transaction’s data can be passed on automatically, resulting in easier internal and external collaboration. Document management software pulls purchase information and creates an accessible data source that allows the data to be shared even further, to additional users outside of the system, and other existing business applications. As soon as vendor invoices are captured into your ECM system, users can access them from within the QuickBooks interface and even route the invoices for review and approval before cutting the check.
Whether you’re pushing data, creating bills, routing invoices or delivering documents, by integrating QuickBooks with enterprise content management software, employees will not only work more efficiently, but they will have complete confidence in the data they are using. If you’re ready to streamline your organization’s Accounting processes with an integrated QuickBooks solution, contact Square 9 Softworks to get started today!
