What have we learnt in the Past Year from Lockdowns, Covid-19 and Working from Home?
It’s been just over 365 days since the UK and most of the world went into lockdown and no one had any idea what issues that would cause for companies and how they would react and adapt to this situation.
When everyone suddenly left the office and began working at home, challenges started to appear fast and all organisations had to find ways to continue their businesses whilst not physically in the office and in some cases reinvent the way they operate.
The First challenge was ensuring that people could work remotely, with access to laptops, access to software critical to their work, and once this hurdle had been overcome the real challenge started.
The main issue for most businesses was Document access, & digital document access, whereas previously it was easy to print something, go to a filing cabinet or access an internal software this now not possible. Accessing important data and documents easily could now be an impossible task, or very slow and hard to achieve. Then there was the added issue of security and complying with GDPR.
What we’ve learnt from this past year is that companies who had Document Management Systems, or utilised cloud-based systems have been able to operate largely uninterrupted and those who still relied heavily on paper or internal systems struggled to overcome these issues, even with Teams & Zoom getting invoice approvals was now slower and more problematic than before.
When things return to some normality, it’s expected that more and more people will continue to work from home, and therefore these issues have to be addressed as soon as possible.
Having a cloud-based Document Management System & Invoice Processing makes all of this possible, there is no software to install, it can be accessed anywhere, even on mobile and it’s fully compliant with all GDPR regulations,
The biggest thing to take away from the past year is that you need to be prepared for anything and ensure that you can adapt to all challenges the business will face and moving towards an online solution, which is accessible by all staff, anywhere, is the best way to do this. Stop having filing cabinets of paper being inaccessible and digitise it, cut down on the office space needed for the hard copies and make it available to everyone easily.
AP Invoice processing solves more problems than just those created by Covid-19 it can streamline your invoicing process shortening month-end, enable quicker payments and ensure approvals are done in a timely manner, and have a complete audit trail of invoices to know where they are in the process at any time
Having all other documents available online can only help staff be more productive and save time and effort to be better used elsewhere in the business.
Stop working harder and start working smarter, be ahead of the game and not chasing it.
