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It's the start of term for universities, and with the start of term comes a lot of paper work to be processed, sorted and filed. Many departments, including Human Resources (HR), Income Team and Accounts Payable (AP), will be overloaded with thousands of paper documents to process manually; which is a very time consuming and expensive task. For some education establishments however, this will not be the case, as we are seeing more schools, colleges and universities investing in document management systems, such as an Invoice Management Solution (IMS), to help streamline their paper process as well as saving time and money.

Accounts Payable is considered one of the most paper rich departments within an organisation, but in the run up, and at the beginning of term, the AP team will be inundated with documents to process. Documents such as supplier invoices and purchase orders will need to be individually processed and put onto the finance system for future reference. Processing these documents manually is very time consuming and expensive, but an automated system will help to speed up the process immensely and reduce the number of errors associated with manually keying in data.

AP staff will also be able to handle queries from suppliers and students more effectively, as any invoice and all accompanying documents and details can be instantly retrieved from the finance system. This saves time and removes the cost of calling them back. According to the Aberdeen Group, companies that have standardised their processes report invoice cycle-times up to 46% faster than those of others (6.1 days versus 11.3 days). This statistic shows that investing in an automated invoice processing system will improve the AP process and productivity as a whole in the department.

Before the start of term the HR department may be busy recruiting new staff, which could include new lecturers; this will require the processing of documents such as application forms and references. HR also looks after payroll, holidays and absences, and sometimes travel and expenses too. The business processes and document management with the HR department can be very complex, mainly due to the sheer number of documents that can exist for each employee. Documents often exist in several formats and locations, with different processes being carried out for each document type. Implementing a Human Resource Management solution can help to streamline the process, as all documents relating to every employee can be retrieved from one place; reducing the time spent searching for documents. Another benefit of a HR solution is the ability to guarantee only the right people have access to important and confidential documents, which is virtually impossible with paper documents.

The income department will be very busy at the beginning of term as they will have to process thousands of documents for student course fees. Manually processing such documents will be a very time consuming and costly job. An automated solution can help to process such documents which will help to improve efficiency as well as time and money. Some document management companies can provide an outgoing document management solution to help deal with the creation of correspondences such as statements and student reminders. The income team will also have the ability to reproduce and redistribute outgoing correspondence held within the solution, which will provide significant savings on processing times and costs.

Although the start of term can be considered a busy time for most education establishments, the solutions mentioned above are suitable all year round. In a recent AIIM survey, 52% of respondents reported that administrative staff in their organisation would be a third or more productive if their processes were work-flowed using scanned forms and documents, with automated data capture. This statistic and the benefits mentioned above, shows that a document management solution will allow staff to become more productive whilst also improving the overall business process.

To find out more about Documation's Document Management Solutions and to read how Southampton Solent University successfully implemented our Invoice Management Solution please visit our website http://www.documation.co.uk/ or email info@documation.co.uk

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Nowadays, the business world is arguably dominated by administration and bureaucracy at virtually every level with even market traders and pitches and stall holders being required to complete a large amount of documentation and administration tasks. It is therefore fortunate that several software companies are in existence that provides software solutions for markets, such as the supply of specialist data collection instruments which can be hand held and even systems which can be uploaded to mobile phones. Such software solutions (being hand held) allow market traders as well as market managers to instantly input data rather than record it in paper format to be uploaded at a later time, thereby running the risk of being accidentally entered incorrectly due to human error.

such software solutions for markets in their portable form have several features which allow the users (whether market managers or market traders and pitch holders) to perform a wide variety of tasks such as the collection of money; the printing of receipts; the checking of compliance as well as checking the status of the insurance statuses of the traders. The software also allows the users (when applied to the case of market managers) to provide the traders and pitch holders on their markets with a fully comprehensive and audited history of the charges incurred by them as well as the payments they have made in order to pay off such debts. Also, through the use of this software, market managers are now able to assign charges to traders as well as pitch holders on a weekly or monthly basis depending on the arrangements that have been made. Also, on the other hand, this type of software solution is equally beneficial for traders and pitch holders as it enables them to make payments on a regular basis without having to physically pay the large sums of money required, thereby making the payment of charges easier.

The development of such types of software has reflected the shift that is becoming ever more apparent to a cashless society. The increase in payments made via credit and debit cards has made it necessary for market traders to adopt methods of receiving payments in such ways as well as issue receipts (as this is undoubtedly the preferred method of payment for the majority of potential customers. software solutions for markets also allows the traders greater accuracy for accounting purposes as every transaction, charge, and payment will be recorded and available for future reference.

Please visit our website for more information on our Software Solutions for Markets

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