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The main two types of accounting process i.e. accounting payment and accounting receiving are always same. It doesn’t matter to the size of the company. Since this process deals with cash so it should be treated with extra care. Though in this generation there are lot of modern gadgets like online bill payments, which save the company’s employees from long tiresome paper work for making invoice but it could not remove it totally. “Still today 80% invoice is done on papers” says the Aberdeen Group research report. This count is more for small business.

Features of Account Data Capture Software

Account Data Capture Software developed by different companies like Kofax , ReadSoft , AnyDoc and Abbyy converts all the paper based invoices, checks, bills, and other documents into data to sent to the accounting or ERP systems. This software has really increased the efficiency of the accounts department of big companies. But small company cannot use this software because of its price and other problems which a large company can bear.

Reason for which small businesses are not using automatic account data capture software

Beside Software cost other factors are:

1. Software License fee (User based or CPU based access)

2. Hardware upgrade for proper interface

3. Employee training

4. Maintenance and support of Software

You should have proper interface to run the software. So you have to check your system by the vendor. Moreover if scanning is done from hand made documents on the scanned paper then error may occur. Vendors still embraced OCR and ICR technologies into their product to capture the account data accurately from the scanned images. Thus there is a long way to go to remove manual entry.

Remedy for Small business companies

These companies can outsource their data securely through Internet to different offshore vendors for different account process. For more details on read Cybelink Secure BPO

Main advantage is we can use existing infrastructure to do all this. Even these companies donot have to change their way of management. Only change is per scanned images will be converted to accounting software or ERP system

After receiving the scanned images, some typical tasks performed by the

offshore vendor which are listed below:

1. Using automated and manual process to extract all the data

2. Hardware upgrade to install the software

3. Insert this extracted data to small business accounts software

4. Perform other accounting operations like Invoice preparing, Bill payment

5. Export the work from the accounting software to a file.

6. Send the file to the small business to import it into their accounting software for verification.

Small business companies can import the finished files into their accounting or ERP systems for verification. Cost of the paper document reduces by 50% if offshore vendors are given for accounting process. Small businesses need to overcome issues like like offshore security and offshore outsourcing cultural issues . Thus by effective cost small companies can also get valuable services.

Originally posted 2010-04-05 16:23:03.

According to a new survey by Equifax, Inc.,commercial bankruptcies among the nation’s more than 25 million small businesses increased by nearly 81 percent in June 2009 from June 2008.

More than 1,000 emergency loans have been granted to small businesses in the United states after the Small Business Administration (SBA) launched the America’s Recovery Capital (ARC) small business loan program last June.

ARC’s goal is to grant 10,000 loans by the time it ends in late 2010. Be;ieve it or not, there are 8,200 FDIC-backed banks in the U.S., but many are slow to participate in this program nationwide, with only 400 lenders currently making ARC loans. Banks thus far that are doing these loans include Wells Fargo, PNC Financial and Zions Bank.

Of all the states participating, it appears as if Minnesota and Wisconsin have generated 28 percent of the ARC loans to date, while Alabama, Oregon and South Carolina, have fewer than five lenders offering the loans.

Interest-free ARC loans are insured, and will grant business owners up to $35,000 to small business owners if they get approved. The SBA is paying banks two percentage points over the prime.

Forecasting a 56 percent default rate, the SBA knows that small businesses are in jeoprody, and it takes awhile for the applications to be processed.

Another alternative to going out of business or bankrupt, is the age old concept of invoice factoring for small businesses. Factoring services allow small businesses to capitalize on significant growth opportunities over a short period of time; often tripling their workforce and increasing revenue 10-fold.

Single invoice factoring (a.k.a. invoice discounting) this is a unique finance tool that is simpler and superior to standard invoice factoring services, as well as factoring funding provided by traditional old line factors, accounts receivable financing, receivable funding and assets based lending approaches.

By selling credit-worthy invoices to a factor, businesses acquire additional funding for immediate working capital.

According to a new survey, U.S. small-business owners say the recession is pushing them to be more efficient, innovative, and cultivate stronger teams. Those companies with 500 or fewer workers and are a key portion of the country’s commerce food chain. They account for more than 99 percent of all employer firms, according to federal statistics, pay nearly 45 percent of the country’s private payroll and produce almost a third of the nation’s export value.

What’s more, 66 percent of small businesses are finding new ways to operate more efficiently during the economic downturn.

Many of these small businesses have found invoice factoring as one of most innovative solutions to be efficient during a bad economy.

38 percent of small business owners expect the economy to improve over the next 12 months. Only 23 percent of them believed it would improve last January of 2009.

Investing in invoice automation can save your business a significant amount of money. Working out where you could make these savings will help you persuade the managers who hold the purse strings that they will see results on the bottom line.

The main areas that invoice automation could save you money are:

Staff costs Speedier payments More accurate payments Reduced storage costs Reduced operations costs

Ten ways to save money

1.    Reduced cost of invoice processing – Research from the Institute of Management and Administration (IOMA) suggests that it costs companies with a low level of invoice automation £7 to process each invoice payment. However, accounts departments with a high level of automation report reducing this to around £4.20. This represents a saving of almost 60%.

2.    Reduced staff costs – With invoice automation, your accounts staff will be able to deal with invoices more quickly and accurately. This means you may require less members of staff. You shouldn’t need to hire any extra workers and the need for temps will be reduced.

3.    Fast Return on Investment (ROI) - Many companies report reducing their accounts costs by 50% within nine months of implementing a purchase to pay solution.

4.    Early payment incentives – Invoice automation gives you much tighter control over when your invoices are paid. You will be in a much better position to take advantage of early payment discounts. These are typically a 2% discount for payment within ten days. On a £5,000 invoice this would represent a saving of £100 so you can see how these savings add up.

5.    No late fees – Legally, if you pay late, your clients can charge you extra. Under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998, if an invoice is not paid on time, clients are entitled to charge you interest calculated at the Bank of England base rate plus 8%.

6.    Improved cash flow – If no early payment incentive is offered, automated invoicing gives you the control and accuracy to pay bills on time but not early, thus improving your cashflow.

7.    Greater accuracy – Invoice automation mean that it’s simple and quick to find invoices, meaning you’ll avoid the problems associated with errors such as duplicate payments. According to IOMA’s findings, 17% of businesses have a duplicate invoice payment rate of 0.1 to 0.5%. If your firm’s duplicate invoice payment rate was 0.3% and your accounts payable team processed £300 million worth of invoices each year this would represent an overpayment of £900,000 annually. Of course, you should be able to retrieve this cash (as long as your system alerted you to the overpayment). However, this could involve paying a third party. Recovery companies charge, on average, a third of the outstanding invoice amount, which in this case would be £300,000.

8.    Lower storage costs – Research suggests that it costs businesses around £11 to file each document. Lots of potential productive working time is also wasted looking for lost or misfiled documents.

Invoice automation slashes the costs of storing documents because you’ll no longer have to find somewhere to put a growing body of paper documents. Nor will you have to buy additional equipment such as filing cabinets to keep all the paper in.

9.    Working with paper documents means a lot of printing, faxing, posting and copying. The costs of these processes all add up. Invoice automation means that many of these processes are no longer necessary and therefore reduces costs, especially those associated with postage and other shipping services.

10.  Business continuity – If there was a disaster such as a flood or fire, losing all your paper files would be a catastrophe. With invoice automation, files are stored electronically and backed up – the risk is minimised.

Microsoft Dynamics GP customization tools selection changed with the introduction of eConnect.  If you are on version 9.0 or higher (current GP version is 10.0 – August 2008), we recommend you to deploy eConnect in GP integration routines programming.  In this small publication we would like to orient you in Microsoft CRM consulting hours capturing and moving them into Great Plains SOP invoice for billing out to your customers.  This example allows MBS consulting practice to build their time billing and accounting systems virtually for free, as Microsoft Dynamics certified partners at this time enjoy GP and Microsoft CRM licenses for free

1.       Service Activity in MS CRM.  You can schedule, assign your CRM users and resources, associate with Account, Contract, Contract Line or even case.  In our example we have case, created on contract line level as future Service Invoice in GP

2.       Account contract and contract lines.  In MS CRM you budget your time and assign hours (more precisely minutely) rates on the contract line level.  Then you invoice contract to enable creating case, associated with contract line and toward this case your consultants log their time in the form of tasks.

3.       Closing the cases and transferring them to your custom time log table.  First of all, you should know that in MS CRM database you should not create custom objects, such as table, view, stored procedure.  Instead you should create new database and place your custom objects there.  Having time log table, you should create nightly SQL job, which will move closed cases and their tasks into time log table and mark these cases as transferred

4.       Creating Service Invoices in GP.  This job is done by eConnect application.  You scan time log table, and create SOP Invoice with non-inventory item lines simply by placing consultant name as item number and description as task title.  Finally, when your eConnect routine creates Sales Invoice for the case, you should mark case as integrated in your time log table

5.       Dexterity nature of GP tables and fields.  Great Plains Dexterity places some limitations on the length of GP SOP invoice line records.  Please, read about the field descriptions in GP tables in Tools->Resource Description->Tables