New market research conducted by Eclipse Group reveals that 75% of companies are still heavily reliant on paper-based invoicing processes, despite the significant risks this brings to the business. The survey, which includes the views of financial professionals from a variety of sectors including insurance, financial services, industrial, and automotive, also found that 83% of respondents currently have to re-type invoices into their finance system upon receipt into the accounts departments rather than using a document management system, raising serious concerns over accuracy and efficiency.

Commenting on the research results, Gary Waylett, CEO of Eclipse Group said, “Given the efficient way most businesses are now able to share information, it is surprising to find so many finance departments are not using a document management solution and continue to re-key data between systems. In addition to duplicating effort, and hence adding cost, re-keying significantly adds the risk of errors which then complicates the reconciliation process.

“Paper-based working is a high-risk approach, as too many companies have unfortunately discovered. Paper records are at risk of flooding, fire, theft or loss in transit to a third party archive, risking compromise of both corporate intellectual property and personal details as well as breach of the Data Protection Act.”

Eclipse Group believes that the adoption of a document management system can reduce manual intervention and electronic authorization will enable finance to focus attention just on the exceptions. A document management solution will also allow staff overheads to be cut, as well as greatly reducing or removing time spent answering queries, searching for invoices and tracking authorization across the organization.

Waylett said “The integration of a document management solution with financials can add greater control and improve compliance, while also reducing risk—as long as effective off-site backups are in place, organizations are no longer exposed to the danger of off-site storage disaster with paper archives. Finance has played a key role in supporting the business over the past few years. As organizations start to look for new growth opportunities, now is the time for the spotlight to turn to finance, to squeeze greater value from the department through greater efficiencies and far better financial control.”

Those finance professionals surveyed said that efficiency gains would be the key driver for implementing a document management system (38%) with improvements in accuracy the second most popular choice (19%). Surprisingly, the green agenda was the least popular reason for implementing document management and imaging software (3%).

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http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/eclipse-group-announces-results-of-market-research-into-use-of-document-management-and-imaging-software-121255824.html