Incoming invoices often fall through the cracks when it comes to process optimization, even though roughly two thirds of incoming documents are invoices.
As a property management company with 1000 units, you process around 4000 invoices a year.
One minute of time saved per invoice can mean almost two weeks of working time. Realistically, however, many administrations need five to ten minutes per invoice to process them. However, with a total working time of just one minute per invoice, including file storage, enormous efficiency potential can be realized.
This can even mean the elimination of an entire accounting employee and thus represent an enormous relief for the office, or you can reclaim your employees' free time in order to increase your own potential. Modern systems such as the Impower property management and ERP software make this possible.
Impower is equipped with AI support that performs text recognition and checks all data for the booking and transfer process. The previously time-consuming filing and naming of invoices is automated by Sharepoint in conjunction with Microsoft Power Automate. Relevant metadata is stored to avoid loss of information, and the special feature of Impower is that Microsoft 365 Sharepoint is available as a document management system (DMS). No separate DMS is required and no unnecessary digital piles are created. An open interface with a connection to the three major customer portals casavi, etg24 and facilioo enables additional storage of invoices in the portal, including invoice approval by the property manager. This not only supports ongoing or annual invoice verification, but also transaction processing.
As a purely cloud-based billing software, Impower has an interface to the scanner manufacturer Plustek, or more precisely, to a customized version of the eScan A350 document scanner. The scanner is ready for use without any installation or connection to the PC and the scanned documents are sent directly to the Impower-using property management company's mail and invoice inbox via Wi-Fi.
A standard workstation or document scanner such as the popular ScanSnap ix1600 from Fujitsu is also suitable. Here, the scanned invoices can be sent to a predefined Impower e-mail address, which is available to each customer individually, at the touch of a button. This means that the PDF invoices from a tradesman can also be processed with a click and sent to the property management company as an e-mail attachment.
The future of accounting and file storage lies in a new generation of cloud-based, open-interface systems that can talk to each other. Another prerequisite for such rationalization is workflow-oriented input screens that do not involve any media discontinuity and do not require a calculator.
The author Alexander Haas is a management consultant and webinar provider for real estate management companies.
www.haas-unternehmensberatung.de
alexander.haas@haas-unternehmensberatung.de
This text was not created by Impower, but was taken in part from the article by Mr. Haas.
You can find the full article here.