paperless office solutions – Cooper Mann Consulting

SmartVault Scan to QuickBooks – When you need to know, go to the source

One of the biggest challenges in business bookkeeping is keeping track of the paper documents and items which back up the data in the accounting system. If you’ve ever had to produce an expense report, or provide a receipt for a business purchase, you know what I’m talking about. That piece of paper is the supporting information for a financial transaction, proof that the entry in the books matches what was actually done. This is what is referred to as the “source” document, and it’s pretty important to keep around, especially in the event of an audit.

Keeping track of paper receipts, bills and other documents which support bookkeeping or accounting transactions can be quite a challenge for any business. In many cases, notes are made in journal entries or in transaction descriptions identifying source documents, but finding the document then becomes an adventure in the paper filing system where you hope the paper you’re looking for is actually in the file referenced. Just the time it takes to organize, store and then later find those documents makes the whole process inefficient, time-consuming, and costly.

What makes sense for many businesses is to attach those source documents right to the transaction in the accounting system. When the accounting was manual, it was easy to do this – simply paperclip the invoice or receipt to the page with the journal entry. In the world of electronic information and computerized accounting software, the process is a bit different, but not much if you use SmartVault and QuickBooks together.

One of the best features of SmartVault, an online document storage and secure file sharing solution, is the integration it offers with QuickBooks financial software. Using SmartVault and QuickBooks together, business owners and the bookkeepers and accountants who support them are able to easily and efficiently manage source accounting documents, connect them to transactions in the accounting system, and retrieve them at any later date required. The process of connecting the source document to the transaction in QuickBooks is the easiest thing to do, too, because you simply use the familiar paperclip to hook the two items together which ultimately deliver an integrated QuickBooks document management solution.

When working in QuickBooks, the SmartVault toolbar is visible on the screen. Operators who need to make entries in the financial system are able to attach source documents right to the transaction using the SmartVault,toolbar – the user simply clicks on the paperclip icon on the toolbar to scan, browse or drag and drop files onto the toolbar and into SmartVault. The source document is now attached to that specific QuickBooks transaction – later, when a user views the QuickBooks entry, clicking on the folder icon on the toolbar will display the attached document, providing instant access to the supporting documentation for the entry and a built-in audit trail. Users can even scan documents as they make the QuickBooks entries, because SmartVault can grab the image from vault folders or directly from the SmartVault Inbox. This gives users scan to cloud functionality and makes scanning, naming and saving documents much easier, and eliminates the need for the user to have computer skills required for storing, organizing, and finding documents on their PC before they can be put into SmartVault.

Considering the volume and variety of paper documents that most businesses deal with, having a simple and fool-proof means to keep important financial documents available is critical. Even more, having those source accounting documents readily available and viewable right from the accounting software becomes an essential element to making sure you have the right information, and the back up to support it, in your accounting and bookkeeping systems.

Make Sense?

Scan to the Cloud – Point A to Point B with no stops

There is a lot of talk today about the benefits of running a “paperless office”, and the number and variety of solutions currently available prove that the concept is a popular one. Paperless offices consume fewer resources in terms of consumables like paper and ink, and require less floor space for handling and storing paper files, saving on office costs and storage space. Paperless offices also make it easier for people to share information, and to control that information so that multiple versions or editions of documents don’t get distributed in error. Paperless office solutions make storing and sharing documents easier and, in many cases, more secure.

Online document management and electronic file storage approaches come in a wide variety of forms, but the consistent requirement for all of them is that the document – the paper file to be stored – first be turned into electronic data. Users familiar with this process understand that it means taking the paper document and scanning it to an electronic image file. You simply place the paper document in the scanner, direct the scanner to scan the document, and then save the file to your hard drive. Then, once the file is saved as an image file on the hard drive, you upload it to your “paperless” storage solution. It sounds like a simple process, but for people with limited PC resources or who are “technically challenged”, it is not at all a simple or straightforward requirement.

What isn’t straightforward is the need for the user to name, save, and then try to find the file on their PC before it can be uploaded to the cloud storage vault. Paperless solutions are supposed to be intuitive, yet it isn’t very intuitive to require a user to store files on their PC before they can use their cloud solution. PC hard drives get filled up, files get old and need to be deleted when no longer needed, and finding one particular file on a stuffed full hard drive can be time-consuming and frustrating. Further, the entire concept of the paperless office and a central filing area is that documents don’t get reproduced and distributed, yet the requirement to save image files to the PC first essentially guarantees that extra copies of files will be left sitting around on PC hard drives even after they are copied to the storage vault.

The better answer is the SmartVault answer, which gives you the ability to scan directly to the cloud from your local scanner. SmartVault is an online document storage and secure file sharing solution that gives users a way to go directly from point A to point B – from paper to stored image – with no stops in between. SmartVault does this with the SmartVault Inbox, which you can think of as an electronic inbox with the same functionality as the old inboxes that used to sit on desks. The Inbox is part of the little SmartVault desktop client which installs on the user PC and delivers the ability to scan directly to the cloud. The SmartVault Inbox makes it easier to get files into the document vault because users can simply drop the document in the scanner, and in one click, the file is scanned directly into SmartVault. The file is auto-named with information from the document for easy searchability – you can even rename the file if you need to, but not having to come up with file names just makes using the solution that much easier to use.

The file is not stored on the local PC, eliminating the requirement to perform regular file cleanups, and now that the file is in SmartVault, you have a secure offsite backup of that document.

So whether a document needs to be uploaded and attached to a QuickBooks financial transaction or just needs to be archived for future use, SmartVault handles the process with just one click. When multiple files or documents need to be processed, that “one click” method saves a lot of time and user frustration.

Paperless office solutions should save steps in the process, not add more of them. SmartVault’s unique approach of allowing users to scan directly to the cloud saves time and frustration, and helps even novice technology users function like seasoned IT savvy professionals.

Make Sense?

SmartVault Scan to QuickBooks – When you need to know, go to the source

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Scan to the Cloud – Point A to Point B with no stops

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