Digitizing Accounts Payable Documents Essay

When accounting files are sent to the archives at the end of the year, the portion taken up by the accounts payable documents usually exceeds that of all other documents combined. For some companies with high accounts payable files, it is a major expense to remove all the paperwork, box it up and identify it, and ship it off to a warehouse, from which it must be recalled occasionally for various tasks. Digitizing the documents is a means of avoiding the expense of archiving. Digitizing a document means that it is laid on a scanner that converts the document image into an electronic image stored in the computer database, which can be recalled by anyone with access to the database. To digitize a document, there should be a high-speed scanner available that is linked to a computer network. Documents are fed into the scanner and assigned one or more index numbers or codes, so that it will be easy to recall the correct documents from storage. For example, a document can be indexed by its purchase order number, date, or supplier number. A combination of several indexes is the best approach, since one can still recall a document, even if one does not remember the first index number. The document images are usually stored on an optical disk since it can hold enormous amounts of storage space (and digitized documents take up a lot of computer storage space). There will probably be many optical disks to provide a sufficient amount of storage, so the disks are usually stored in a â€Å"jukebox,† which gives the user access to all the data on all the storage disks. Users can then call up the images from any terminal that is linked to the network where the information is stored. There are additional advantages to using digitization of documents. Besides the reduced archiving costs, it is also possible to nearly eliminate the time needed to access documents. With a traditional archiving system, older documents must be requested from a warehousing facility that may require several days to deliver. Even in-house documents may require several minutes to an hour to locate. If customer service is important, and that service is linked to providing rapid access to data, then digitizing documents allows a company to instantly satisfy customer requests for documents by searching the computer fi les for them, no matter how old the documents may be. Another advantage to using digitization is that it avoids having to take out and replace files. Whenever someone removes a file and later returns it, there is a risk that the fi le will be misplaced. Every time a file is misplaced, it will be time-consuming to find it again. By accessing documents through a computer network, there is no need to take out or replace the document—it is always sitting in the same storage location in the computer, and cannot be lost. Yet another advantage is that multiple users can access the same file at the same time. Since it is a digital image, there is no reason why the computer cannot potentially distribute a copy of the digital document to everyone who asks for it, even if they all do so at the same time. Reference link: http://classof1. com/homework-help/accounting-homework-help