The Pain:  Inaccurate data

How many customer support calls involve an error in your company’s database? The time it takes to locate and correct the problem could be better spent solving other issues. Worse still, incorrect data in your finance back-end system can breed trouble for your company in an audit. These pains typically begin once the data enters your system.

These factors contribute to your pains:

• Manual entry errors:  As we know, to err is human. Unfortunately, these errors can end up in your ECM, ERP or financial database when data is manually entered. Correcting these errors in your data clogs productivity and costs your company time and money.

• Inconsistent formats:  With many document types, such as invoices, the placement of critical data varies greatly from one version of the document to another. As a result, data gets manually entered into your back-end system later than it should. It’s no surprise, then, that the Institute of Management Accountants (IOMA) reports that the average vendor payment costs $34.38 to process.*

• No time to double-check calculations or cross-check data: When time is short and a mountain of documents needs to be processed, ancillary tasks go undone that otherwise could improve your company’s data. You may not have the time to process your documents, balance the financial data in them and validate the information on them against the records in your database, too. This opens up the possibility of incorrect and incomplete data in your system.  

What capabilities does your organization need to prevent inaccurate data
from entering its system?  Here are a few:

• Automated data capture: By defining the type of data to capture off your paper documents and how to format the output, automating your data entry can significantly increase the accuracy of data entering your ECM, ERP or other back-end system. Automation also requires far fewer staff members to process the same amount of work, so your productivity will soar. The remaining staff can be better utilized in other departments, reducing the need to rehire after attrition. This alone can be a great cost savings.

• Automatic calculations: An automated solution can balance the line item figures in your documents and flag those that are incorrect, ensuring that correct financial data enters your company’s back-end system.

• Database table lookup: Using a database table lookup in your automated document processing solution is an effective way to verify data before it enters your ECM, ERP or financial database. It can match an item number off your document with its description in your database. And, a table lookup into your financial system can compare invoices, including line-item details, with purchase orders to help invoice data move to the approval process much faster.

• Data verification: Verification allows a human operator to correct the characters the automated solution flags as questionable. When verification is complete, the operator then commits the data for transmission into your back-end system. With the combination of data automation and human verification, many companies realize data unsurpassed accuracy.

Learn how a document servicing company deployed a powerful AnyDoc solution to realize 99.8% data accuracy, increasing productivity and turnaround time for client projects.

AnyDoc Software offers a range of solutions to ensure valid data enters your company’s back-end system, no matter what types of documents you process.

* IOMA, Managing Accounts Payable newsletter, August 2005.