Companies used to store the bookkeeping records of their business in filing cabinets. This took up lots of space with plenty of paper documents linked to the company’s and clients’ financial details. These documents had all the details in an organized fashion, such as:
- Paid invoices of clients
- Unpaid invoices of clients
- Information regarding the payroll of every employee
- Payment records of business contractors
- Plenty of business-related files which are important yet of no specific use now.
These paper or cabinet files are never easy if you are looking for essential data, and viewing those records turns into a troublesome task. If a company is planning to prepare for the upcoming tax season, it needs to review all files to collect the required data.
However, today we are lucky to have more technologically advanced management systems that have made the process much easier and more convenient for all accountants and bookkeepers. In this technological era, companies have a proper computerized system for entering all the records of the company, including the employee management system, product management system, inventory system, and customer management system. All these systems have made it easier for a business to locate any kind of digital data and use it easily. Similarly, if companies adopt electronic filing methods for financial documentation, it is much easier to store data, locate it within minutes, retrieve information, and share all bookkeeping records with other authorized employees digitally.
Getting started with an electronic bookkeeping system
If your business is currently using the manual paper system for bookkeeping, this is the ideal time to turn towards digitalization. Digital bookkeeping has many benefits over the traditional bookkeeping system. It saves the time of the employees, retrieves the information much quicker, and even saves office storage space.
However, suppose you are considering the shift towards the paperless filing of your financial data. In that case, you need to make sure that you make a proper backup of all the information on a cloud so that you can retrieve it in case of an accident or data loss.
Shifting from a manual to a digital system will require time and effort at an initial level. A company needs to train their current employees regarding their new document management system so that they can get familiar with the system’s outlook and technicalities.
The process of going digital starts with finding or outsourcing the design of an easy-to-switch document management system for the company. The designed system should keep the company’s business in mind. The main idea is to avoid online cloud services such as Google Docs or Dropbox to maintain the security of the sophisticated data of the business. It is ideal to look for an enterprise management system for documentation, such as a file cabinet. The file cabinet has multiple packages with plenty of options for accountants, such as drag-and-drop storage systems, sub-folders for more organized data management, and a utility for scanning and searching the text.
When you have finalized your document management system, you can simply get started by forming all the folders for your company. Designing a structure of your folders is the key to an organized management system. These folders may include sub-folders for all your necessary financial accounts. Examples are:
- Accounts Payable
- Accounts Receivable
- Vendor Receipts
- Banking
- Payroll
- Tax
- Loans
Once you are done creating a proper structure for the folders, you can put all the files into these folders and organize your data in paperless filing cabinets. Keeping your data safe and in the proper place will ensure your success.
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