The sudden rush towards remote working practices in 2020 led many organizations to implement changes to upgrade their document capture processes on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

For many companies, the Covid pandemic compelled them to change almost overnight, given how suddenly employees found themselves forced to work from home. The processes they had in place to capture incoming documents such as invoices and statements were instantly redundant.

Many of these changes were mere sticking plasters, designed to cover the time spent working remotely.  However, as the pandemic ended, it became clear that the changes to processes would need to become more permanent, as lots of businesses fully adopted a hybrid or remote working set-up.

For those organizations who had out-dated procedures prior to the pandemic, upgrading document capture processes became even more important and remain a vital part of making financial processes efficient. Document management automation offers a great opportunity to make life easier for your employees and make them happier, while gaining greater efficiencies across the organization.

In this article, we identify 5 ways your organization can upgrade your document capture processes on Business Central.

Challenges of out-dated processes

Relying on outdated processes that are predominantly paper-based presents a host of issues across the business. Manually filing and processing documents is time-consuming, boring and often a waste of a finance team members’ talents: a deflating feeling for any employee.

Manual processes also increase the risk of human error and payment deadlines being missed. Increased job frustration and reduced job satisfaction is not a healthy combination.

A paper filing cabinet, or not having a shared electronic archive to store documents, can lead to poorer customer service. If a customer calls with a query about an order they have made, a customer service representative should have all the necessary information in front of them. If they don’t, they need to waste theirs and their finance team colleagues’ time in finding relevant documents.

This slows down the service they provide; worse still if they end up asking the customer to resend the documents.

All the above issues were highlighted during the shift to hybrid and remote workforces.

Taking action to make the document management process more efficient using automation software is crucial for every type of modern finance team.

Benefits of upgrading document capture on Business Central

Given the challenges highlighted above, the benefits of upgrading your document capture are clear. These include:

• Time-savings:  Finance teams no longer need to spend time manually filing and processing documents. Having an automated process frees up time to focus on more important and engaging tasks. A study by Paperjet found a reduction in document processing times of 50-80% across industries that were utilizing document management automation. 
• Less employee frustration: Manually filing documents is not the reason why any finance team member chose their career path. It’s a monotonous and thankless task. Freeing team members from this task will enable them to flourish and use their talents to focus on more strategic, high-value tasks that are of greater benefit to their organization. This reduces their frustration and is much more likely to lead to happier and more productive employees.
• Centralized storage: Storing documents in an electronic archive (such as SharePoint) means that even employees without a Business Central licence can access the information they require. Filing documents and indexing them automatically and consistently with metadata makes searching later much easier. In addition, filing documents outside the Business Central tenant avoids eating into internal storage space (Business Central currently offers 80GB) and the performance issues related to bloating the database. Storing documents in SharePoint and accessing them from Business Central offers ease of use, without the cost of purchasing additional expensive storage capacity.
• Better customer relations:  Having up-to-date information available to the right people speeds up and improves the level of service delivered to customers. A paper-based storage system means somebody (either the customer service team member or the finance team) must physically search for and retrieve a document in question. Offering secure access and an ability to retrieve documents quickly from the centralized archive removes the time spent doing this.
• Cost-savings: By digitally storing documents received in paper form, there is less need to store the originals in a filing cabinet or room. This can reduce insurance costs and frees up space in the office to be used more productively as well as offering environmental benefits. 

5 ways to upgrade

The benefits above present a strong argument for upgrading document capture on Business Central. We’ve identified 5 ways to do this using an add-on such as Zetadocs Capture, which will enable your organization to take advantage of these opportunities: 

1. Drag & drop

The ability to drag and drop electronic documents received such as emails, PDFs and images into Business Central is a real time-saver.

Drag & drop functionality is not offered as standard in Business Central, but is enabled by Zetadocs Capture. A user simply drags and drops the document into the Zetadocs FactBox in Business Central. This creates a helpful audit trail of documents related to that Business Central record and provides further context to a user as all documents related to a particular record are visible.

This is particularly helpful for a credit controller, who needs to see details of communications and documents exchanged when chasing payment.

Each document dropped in the Zetadocs FactBox gets stored in an electronic archive and can be linked to its transaction, allowing easy access directly from Business Central.

The GIF below demonstrates how simple it is to drag and drop documents into Business Central using Zetadocs:

2. Processing paper documents

Documents such as invoices from suppliers and proof of delivery notices are often received in paper form. These need to be processed into Business Central.

This can involve a member of the finance team going through each document one by one and manually entering the details, and sometimes there are circumstances when it is preferable to manually file paper documents that have been scanned in and converted into electronic versions.

It could be that documents received should be assigned to departments other than the finance team, or different members of the finance team may have responsibility for specific types of documents.

As with any manual process, this can be inefficient and time-consuming. In addition, if there are several members of an organization working on processing documents that have been scanned in, your Business Central system can get clogged up with duplicate documents, unless there is a clear process in place to avoid this.

Using multi-user document queues with Zetadocs Capture eliminates this risk and makes it easy to assign documents to the right department or person to process.

When scanning in a paper document received, you can select which document queue it should be assigned to. You may separate the documents by department (e.g. sales, marketing, customer service) or by document type (e.g. purchase invoices, sales orders).

This enables better organization of processing documents. Furthermore, documents can be “checked out” of the queue once processed, protecting against inadvertent posting or deletion by another team member. This reduces inefficiencies and avoids wasted time.

3. Automated filing using barcodes

Using barcodes will enable you to automate the process of capturing and filing paper documents.

By simply printing out a barcoded sticky label and applying it to a document, you can drastically reduce the amount of time spent on this task.

Your Business Central system assigns a unique barcode that is specific to each record in the system. You print out the unique barcode that relates to the document you are processing and stick it on the document. Then, use your scanner to create electronic versions of the documents.

Zetadocs Capture reads the barcode and assigns the scanned copy of the documents to the relevant record in Business Central, filing them automatically. You can schedule this to run as a background task, so you can set it up then get on with other tasks while the documents are processed.

To help organize your electronic archive, Zetadocs Capture Essentials uses a three-tier folder structure in SharePoint. Folders are labelled by date, customer name and document type, which makes it easy to find a specific document. Configurable metadata is also added to archived documents, which provides easier search and retrieval.

The GIF below showcases the automated filing of batches of documents:

4. Customized filing

Your organization may have specific business needs that require some customization of any tool you implement to upgrade your document capture on Business Central.

If you select Zetadocs Capture to upgrade your document capture, you can use the Zetadocs Capture Plus SDK to apply additional business logic to suit your requirements.

For example, you may want to set-up your own folder structure, rather than use the three-tier structure offered by Zetadocs Capture Essentials. If your organization has multiple companies, you may wish to keep the three-tier folder structure but add an additional tier above for each company.

Alternatively, you may want specific documents to be available on a customer portal or add custom metadata tags. An example of this would be to add a salesperson code to documents received. This allows each salesperson to search in SharePoint for documents related to sales they have made, regardless of whether they have access to Business Central. This streamlines document retrieval and is also useful for auditing.

An example of this customization can be seen in the GIF below:

Our team would be delighted to discuss any specific requirements you have, to help you evaluate whether Zetadocs Capture is the right solution for you.

5. AP automation

An alternative method of simplifying invoice capture, approval and order matching within Business Central is to use AP automation software.

There are various options available that utilize Optical Character Recognition (OCR) alongside AI technology to extract key data fields from supplier or vendor invoices. The extracted data is used to create purchase invoices or credit memos inside Business Central. By using automatic extraction of key fields, an accounts payable team can save the time taken to rekey these purchase documents manually. Not only does this save countless hours that could be better spent on more strategic finance tasks, it also helps to reduce the risk of human error that naturally occurs with more manual data entry.

This is helpful when an organization receives lots of invoices from the same suppliers and can help to speed up the processing of invoices dramatically.

Zetadocs AP Automation uses next-generation, AI-driven technology to extract key data from your supplier invoices such as total, invoice ID, and line items and details such as item name, item quantity, item price and more. You can then automatically match purchase invoices to purchase orders and receipts for quick and accurate vendor payments. Approvers have instant visibility of original invoices and can approve within Business Central.

Summary

This blog post has provided you with 5 ways you can upgrade your document capture on Business Central.

Companies around the world, from remote workforces to those in the office, continue to adopt and benefit from document management automation to free up the time as well as to gain great cost savings throughout the process. The methods suggested in this blog post ensure the advantages of upgrading your document capture processes are felt throughout your organization. Happier employees with more time to focus on more productive tasks, cost-savings, greater efficiency and better customer relations are just some of the benefits associated with automating document management tasks.

The solution

There are numerous options available if you are looking to upgrade your document capture processes. We have highlighted some benefits of our own solution: Zetadocs Capture, which includes our AP Automation solution.

To see Zetadocs Capture in action, book a demo today. Alternatively, read some reviews and get the Zetadocs Capture Extension for Business Central from Marketplace.