Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

10–6. Implement Document Imaging

Many companies find themselves in the situation of constantly searching for files. Perhaps several departments need them at once and the files are constantly shifted back and forth, resulting in no one able to consistently locate them. Also, some employees are better than others at returning files when they are finished with them, while other companies just have a hard time obtaining a qualified group of staff people who can reliably file documents in the right place. Whatever the case may be, it is a common problem and one that can seriously impact operations.

One answer to this quandary is to convert all paper documents into digital ones and store them in the central computer system so that, potentially, all employees can access them from all locations—and do so at the same time. Digital documents have the advantage of never being lost (with one caveat, noted later in this section), never being destroyed (as long as there are proper back-up routines taking place), and being available to anyone with the correct kind of access. These are formidable advantages and have caused many larger corporations to adopt this approach as the best way to avoid the majority of their filing problems.

To implement a document-imaging system, one must first obtain a document scanner with a sufficiently high throughput speed and resolution to allow scanning a multitude of documents, as well as scanning with a sufficient degree of clarity to obtain a quality digital ...