The company mailroom has traditionally been one of the most chaotic departments in an organization. With packages and envelopes flooding in now and then, it has always been full of manual activity and, thus, prone to errors. These traditional systems drained resources quickly in terms of staff, time, and cost.
This is why companies today have adopted Digital Mailrooms to streamline communication and enhance business procedures and services. Where once both suppliers and buyers communicated using invoices on paper, now they use email templated documents.
Despite that, the flow of paper-based communication is still significant. Research suggests that 23% of companies receive over 5,000 inbound documents in mails every month, whereas mailrooms in businesses have to process faxes 60% of the time.
Making digital mailroom automation a part of this workflow can greatly optimize all procedures. In this article, we will discuss the role of digital mailroom automation in Accounts Payable and why should businesses make it a part of their workflow.
What Is Digital Mailroom Automation?
Digital mailroom automation is the process of automating incoming mail processes. With the help of document capture and scanning technologies, businesses can digitize incoming emails, classify, and distribute them within the organization.
These mailroom systems cater to emails & paper documents and are essential for standardizing internal mail distribution procedures. This is why digital mailroom automation is necessary for ensuring compliance with company policies.
As many companies are legally bound to archive paper documents for a certain time, being able to process paper documents through digital mailroom automation allows companies to streamline document management.
Importance of Digital Mailrooms Automation in Accounts Payables
Companies relying on paper-based systems for AP processes lack a secure and cost-effective solution for digitizing incoming faxes, invoices, and other essential emails. Moreover, automating, classifying, and distributing these documents becomes even more difficult in such systems.
In the absence of digital mailroom automation, financial data in these emails becomes siloed. Therefore, processing invoices efficiently and understanding the end-to-end flow of information becomes difficult for AP personnel.
Intelligent Data Capture powers the digital mailroom by gathering important business information and initiating various business processes. It provides a single point of entry for all essential documents (paper or digital), enabling organizations to ensure compliance, replace traditional systems with smart business processes, increase efficiency, and reduce operational costs.
Read to learn more: 17 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Considering a Digital Mailroom Solution
Digital Mailroom Automation provides a single platform for all your AP processes and gives you a holistic view of your entire mail system. If you have the right team by your side, it can help you execute digital transformation in your Accounts Payable department, prevent unnecessary delays, cash-in discounts, and implement seamless workflows.
The Role of Digital Mailroom Automation in Accounts Payable
Digital Mailroom Automation is a robust solution for streamlining your mail system in favor of your AP department. It allows users to automatically detect, transform, and leverage process-ready content restricted within mails and documents.
Ultimately, the technology delivers immediate responses, accurate information, and helps users analyze automated transactions. Although digital mail automation benefits organizations in several ways, the following are some of the main ways these solutions impact the Accounts Payable department.
Classify and Capture Financial Data from Different Devices
With the help of advanced machine learning techniques, Digital Mailroom Automation can capture and classify all kinds of text, whether it is handwritten or machine-printed.
While OCR helps the system scan information, new Natural Language Processing (NLP) features process this information and classify text based on the information you provide. This allows these solutions to identify financial documents accurately and align unstructured content and documents accurately.
Regardless of whether you source information through email, cloud faxes, multi-function printers, the web, or scanners, DMA can standardize all information and deliver it in a production-ready form.
Reduces Operational Costs
A traditional mailroom is riddled with countless manual tasks and employees must process the waves of envelopes and packages, every day. As digital mailroom automation allows you to eliminate manual tasks, it is a practical way of reducing operational costs.
Companies no longer have to pay large amounts for printing paper, processing them individually, and reproducing through photocopies. Likewise, they can reduce associated costs, such as paper supplies, renewing ink cartridges, equipment maintenance, and exchanging documents off-site.
By replacing a paper-based system with Digital Mailroom Automation, businesses can increasingly reduce their costs and expand their operations in other key areas of the company. What’s more. Research by AIIM reveals that 46% of companies that implement Digital Mailroom Automation receive a payback within 12 months or less.
Single Console for AP Processing
Digital Mailroom Automation provides businesses with a single platform that can connect multiple departments and locations worldwide. The technology helps you implement enhanced collaboration between remote teams, and collect & organize data from disparate sources. At the same time, it supports a number of distinct users, as well as several diverse processes, ranging from Accounts Payable to onboarding.
Ensure Policy Compliance
Processing documents manually always poses a risk of human errors that lead to missing documents and erroneous calculations & payments. However, since digital mailroom automation allows you to capture digital documents as they arrive, filing, classifying, and routing them immediately is extremely easy.
The digital mailroom provides a single console for managing all incoming data, where managers can clear audit trails for document lifecycles. At the same time, intelligent features in these solutions ensure confidential documents are protected properly.
Document Security
Classified content in Document Mailroom Automation is routed only to the relevant users in a timely manner. Authorized users can access that content at the earliest and archive them in a secure machine.
Reportedly, cyberattacks and data fraud & theft are the two greatest risks for businesses in the United States in 2020. By following a rule-based system, the technology implements the consistent and swift deployment of security procedures for incoming content. This makes it easier for managers to protect their data from costly security breaches and data losses.
Ultimately, Document Mailroom Automation protects your financial data from these attacks and prevents paper documents from being stolen by creating secure digital archives.
Digital Mail Automation is an essential technology for today’s data-driven Accounts Payable workflows. It not only servers as the foundation of an AP automation system, but also helps companies leverage financial data effectively within their organization.
