How Finance Departments Achieve Efficiency with DMS

Financial audits, tax filings, quarterly statements, billing and invoicing. Finance departments work with a massive number of documents. Mismanaging or improperly storing all this information leads to even more inefficiencies.

Luckily, new digital tools make easy and efficient document management simple. Document management systems (DMSs) come with an abundance of tools and features to improve workflows, increase office efficiency, and keep companies more secure. In this post, we’ll focus on just a few of the ways DMSs increase efficiency for finance departments in particular.

Collaboration

Spreadsheets are a primary piece of equipment in the finance department toolkit. Inevitably, these spreadsheets are going to need to be shared among several users, sometimes requiring multiple individuals to access these documents simultaneously.

Using a cloud-based DMS to store and archive these documents makes sharing and collaborating within the same office or remotely simple and easy. From a program like PairSoft, documents can be shared as a secure link, so collaborating just takes a click. DMSs can also be set up to automatically create audit trails, so anyone can view who made changes to a document, and when it was made. With integrated email capture, correspondence related to the shared document is also tracked and viewable.

Advanced search

This is one feature that is consistently at the top of just about every department head’s list of reasons for switching to DMS. Advanced search features make finding the most minute data point in massive stacks of information a breeze.

For financial departments, that could mean searching for a precise figure mentioned or recorded in financial statements, expense reports, email correspondences, and even scanned images. Every time a document is captured and saved in a DMS, all the content therein is archived and indexed, including the metadata surrounding it. Complex values can be tracked down in seconds, pulling up exactly what you’re looking for with pinpoint accuracy.

Mobility

Remote and mobile work arrangements are more and more the norm, and finance departments are not immune from this trend. Even in the office, number crunchers increasingly rely on tablets and phones to get their work done. The anytime, anywhere access to business-critical documents this enables creates vast efficiencies. When paired with a modern DMS, however, these efficiencies grow exponentially. By offering a consistent and familiar interface that is easy to use, the right DMS makes working across phone, desktop, laptop, and tablet easy for even the least technically savvy among us.

Task tracking

Finance teams know how important meeting deadlines is. Whether it’s a quarterly budget, a financial report, an invoice, a tax document or a compliance report, having everything completed and turned in on time can make or break your quarter.

Automated task tracking and management features included in a quality DMS makes it easy to stay on top of where everything is in each project and process. You can create automatic alerts and have them target exactly who’s been delegated with each task in a project. Notifications can be set up to let you know certain tasks have gone uncompleted by predetermined points in time. These time frames can also be adjusted on the fly as reality changes.

Security

You may not think of security concerns as necessarily related to efficiency. There are, however, several key security features that can be automated to make keeping your team safe more efficient. For instance, automated lockdowns can be preprogrammed to go into effect once unusual activity is detected within a system (e.g., the wrong password being repeatedly entered).

In addition to all the other added security features in a DMS, including but not limited to multifactor authentication, end-to-end encryption, and access hierarchies, automated security monitoring keeps your organization safe and your IT team free to focus on increasing efficiencies elsewhere.

Make no mistake, these are by no means the only benefits of switching to a robust, digital DMS. To learn more, contact PairSoft or schedule a free personalized demo today. We’ll show you even more powerful features that can transform the way your finance team operates.