Document Management Solutions For Universities

By Author: Donald Nason
Total Articles: 48
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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. Documation 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 www.documation.co.uk or email info@documation.co.uk.