Document Management News

A Scottish social care charity has reduced the time taken to complete its VAT return from three days to just one hour with the implementation of a financial management system (FMS) from COA Solutions.

VSA, which provides a range of caring services to individuals and families in North East Scotland, is using an FMS with integrated electronic workflow and document imaging functionality. The new system is saving VSA £25,000 a year.

By using this system VSA has also cut bank account reconciliation from two days to just 30 minutes and has significantly freed-up document storage space.

Ellen Robertson, director of corporate services at VSA, said, “Our previous accounting software was cumbersome and very restrictive, especially when we needed to carry-out financial analysis for reporting purposes.

"We needed a system with more advanced functionality which could help us improve our financial transparency and operational efficiency."

Since implementing COA Solutions’ FMS, VSA has automated a number of financial processes which were previously manually-intensive, moving towards a more paperless working environment.

Ellen said, “COA Solutions’ system has enabled us to streamline our processes and dramatically improve efficiency. Processing our VAT return takes only an hour when previously it used to take three days."

The reconciliation of VSA's 15 banks accounts at the end of each month is also much simpler, taking just 30 minutes when previously it would take two days, said Ellen.

With the integrated electronic workflow solution, authorised staff at VSA are able to track the status of their budgets 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and managers can receive budget reports electronically.

In the future, VSA plans to extend its use of the workflow solution to enable staff to electronically raise purchase orders, further improving purchase-to-pay efficiency.

With the system's integrated document management - which uses technology from COA Solutions subsidiary Version One - authorised VSA staff now have quick and easy access to scanned images of purchase invoices, freeing-up the finance team’s time whilst reducing document storage space.

Previously, the finance team had to trawl through boxes in the basement if they wanted to locate an invoice, which was extremely time-consuming.

Ellen said, “By electronically storing around 20,000 purchase invoices each year and destroying the paper originals, we have significantly freed-up storage space."

Providing authorised staff with the ability to retrieve imaged invoices themselves has also reduced the finance team’s workload, contributing to the £25,000 a year savings generated by the COA Solutions system, said Ellen.