Accountants, Auditors and Consultants have a large number of clients ranging from small to medium to large. These firms have to deal with a huge volume of data of their clients, be it paper-based or in electronic form. Finding the right document at the right time sometimes becomes challenging and consumes a significant amount of time. At times, the staff of these firms have to work on client’s premises. This even further complicates the matters as a lot of files have to be carried at multiple locations. Every professional has to abide by the principles of confidentiality and make sure that client’s information/ documents are only shared with those who have to work on that particular assignment. Quite often, files and documents – whether electronic or paper-based in scanned form – are located at a different place while needed somewhere else. Since accounting, auditing and consulting professionals work in teams, there are different levels of hierarchy where work is done by one, reviewed by others and finally approved by senior professionals. This leads to various versions being created of most of the documents. Sometimes, the correct version cannot be easily found while at other times, older versions are either lost or over-written. The need to share files between team members and clients makes the matters worse. The solution to all the above challenges is SmartFolders, a Document Management System used to store, manage and track electronic documents (MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and electronic images (PDF, JPEG etc.) of paper-based information captured through the use of a document scanner. All the documents/ files are stored in a special dedicated electronic ‘vault/ repository. Remote working/ Work-from-home is possible as all the staff can access every folder and document from anywhere in the world.
SmartFolders can have a significant impact on productivity for both accounting/ auditing/ consulting firms and their clients. It reduces the amount of time and money spent on paperwork. The said firms and their clients can use less paper, which will make it easier for them to access documents, transactions, and records on-line.
It provides outstanding ‘Access Controls’ capability. The platform allows you to provide folder-level and document-level rights (View, Print, Edit, Delete, Share) to different team members based on your preferences.
Thanks to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, It has a robust live-search capability that allows you to search documents not only by the file name and information, such as keywords, but also by the content of the files. PDFs, Docx files, and even screen-shots and document scans can be extensively searched.
Using SmartFolders, organisations are able to save many versions of a file or document while preserving the present contents and all previous versions. These documents may be recovered with a single click. The document is locked for certain users while others are modifying it on the system.
The ‘Audit Trail’ feature allows us to keep track of the work being done by any member of our team at any given time. This software creates a log of the time spent in and out of the system, the folders and documents accessed, and the versions of a document that have been created. A users log and the versions of documents he or she has worked on will tell us exactly how much time he or she has spent working during the day.
Team members’ routine procedures can be simplified by the automating the workflows. This standardises company processes, enhancing cooperation and bringing efficiency. It also lets you get a number of ‘business intelligence reports’ that will help you make important decisions.
Since the accountants and auditors are dealing with information that can be very sensitive, special consideration has been given to the security features in SmartFolders. There is also a possibility of E-Signature integration with the SmartFolders that enables the clients to sign the documents electronically, without the hustle of document locomotion.
The firms need to obtain many documents from their clients. Traditionally, these documents were normally obtained physically or through emails and then placed in the relevant files. SmartFolders give you the option to create Portals where clients can place the relevant information easily within seconds. There is also an option of linking your email with the SmartFolders.
You may deploy SmartFolders on cloud or on-premises server. In either case, the functionality of the software is same. Whatever storage option you choose, the implementation of SmartFolders has become more affordable for accounting, auditing and consulting firms in recent years, and they don’t need to have any formal IT department, unless they become too large.