Going Paperless?
Top Tips for Accounting Practices
Joanne Day
Because of the type of work accounting practices perform, there are specific workflow processes you should implement as you plan or perfect your paperless office.
Securing sensitive documents sent as e-mail attachments
Once a practice begins scanning and filing documents, here’s what invariably happens. A client calls your firm requesting information. The person servicing the client on your end goes through the following thought process: “I have that information electronically. Why would I print it out to mail or fax it? Why don’t I just e-mail the document to the client?”
Here’s the caveat. If the document contains any personal or confidential information, such as social security number or financial data, as a both a privacy policy and a best practice, these documents should be sent as encrypted and password protected e-mail attachments.
Sending data over the Internet is like mailing a postcard through the
While you can encrypt files using the security feature within the full version of Adobe (not the free reader), we’ve found this method to be time consuming and costly (to purchase the full version Adobe for every employee). Another alternative is a program called Attach Plus ($49.99 per license at www.attachplus.com). Each time you e-mail a document, be it a Word, Excel or an existing PDF file, you are given the option to password protect the e-mail attachments. When attaching files, simply select the Attach Plus button.
Attach Plus provides a variety of options to modify the documents on the fly as you attach them to your e-mail.
To view the password protected files, the recipient only needs the free Adobe reader (version 6 or higher) along with their password. In addition to protecting attachments, Attach Plus provides other useful options used by accountants:
Bookmark – combine multiple files into a single PDF container that contains hyperlinks to each of the documents within the file. Bookmarking enables a recipient to open a single attachment with hyperlinks to all of the tax documents contained within.
Watermark – Add a watermark such as “draft” to each page of the attached document. When the recipient views or prints the file, the watermark will be clearly splashed across each page.
Restrict – send only certain pages from a file or restrict the recipient from modifying or printing the file.
Integrate all documents into one system
Accountants are increasingly offering additional services to their clients, such as financial planning or investment management. As such, a firm should choose a document management application that easily handles all of your files, not just tax documents, and not just scanned images. For example, you want an application that easily files and retrieves Microsoft Office and Excel files, in addition to e-mails and e-mail attachments. No reason to create one system for scanned images and another for your electronic files. If you anticipate your firm offering new services in the future, consider looking at document management applications such as Worldox (www.worldox.com) that are not exclusively tied to, but yet still integrate with, your tax software application.
Flatbed Scanners
Because accountants deal with all sorts of odd sized slips of paper (such as receipts), a scanner that has a flatbed is typically a very useful feature. The Fujitsu 5220C is a base flatbed model that holds 50 pages in the document feeder, scans double sided, and scans 25 images per minute. Depending on the scanning volume you do during tax season, you can purchase more costly models with faster scanning speeds.
An alternative is to add scanning capability to your copier. We are not fond of this option because depending on the proximity of the copier to your work area, you have to either walk to the copier then return to your desk to file, which is inconvenient from a workflow perspective. If you already have scanning capability on your copier, then use the copier whenever a flatbed is needed and purchase high speed desktop scanners (without flatbeds) for use elsewhere in the firm for the following reasons: 1) Flatbed scanners take up a lot of room on a desk. 2) When someone is using the copier, then someone else can’t scan and vice-versa, it is preferable from a workflow perspective to have distributed desktop scanners rather than one scanner on the copier. 3) It is inconvenient to walk to the copier to scan, and back to your desk to file – it’s much faster to do it all in one location.
Use OCR to enable Bulk Filing
Essentially, OCR takes its best guess at the text on a scanned document and either creates an invisible, searchable layer of text over the top of the file or creates a separate text file that accompanies the document. Accountants in particular can benefit from using optical character recognition (OCR) software for the following reason. There is a trade off between how long it takes someone to scan and file documents versus how likely you are to refer to them in the future. In your office, OCR software would enable you to scan all of a client’s supporting documents (e.g, 1099s, W-2s, charitable receipts, etc.) for a given tax return as one bulk file, rather than scan, file and name them separately. Later if you needed to locate a piece of information, OCR enables you to pinpoint not only the file that contains a charitable receipt, but where in the file that receipt is located. Specifically, you can:
1. Perform a text search for the file.
2. Once you are in the file, perform a text search within the document.
Dual Monitors
While you may be anxious about introducing dual monitors within your practice initially, once you do, you will be amazed at how you ever managed to live without them. With two flat panel monitors plugged into your computer simultaneously, you can work in your tax software on the monitor directly in front of you, while referring to the client’s documents on the screen just to the right. You will love the boost in your productivity and after a few weeks, you may be surprised how quiet your printer has become.
If you focus your efforts on how to make your paperless office increase your productivity (rather than simply be a replacement filing system), you’ll get so much more out of your system. Going paperless can truly transform your practice.
Joanne Day is a managing partner of Trumpet, Inc., a firm dedicated to implementing document management systems for financial service firms.
AZ CPA – January 2007
