How long does it take your AP department to manually process a single expense report? With errors, like incorrect or missing codes, the process time could easily double. Manually fixing issues is both time-time-consuming and inefficient.

From the employee angle, how long does it take for them to complete and submit a single report? One recent customer stated that It used to take their employees around an hour to do one report manually, making copies and paper-clipping receipts to their documents.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Customers typically choose DocLink for its ability to help them eliminate paper for greater visibility and control of their documents. But going paperless is just the beginning. DocLink’s configurable workflow moves documents through your organization, such as invoice approvals, while maintaining visibility throughout the process, which results in HUGE time savings

And when it comes to automating other manual processes such as expense reports, purchase requisitions and credit card reconciliations, DocLink’s Smart Form Toolkit is what help make DocLink a unique and valuable proposition.

Smart Forms are custom windows that can be used to provide a rich user experience for indexing documents, retrieving document and/or streamlining business processes. Whether it’s a form you need people to fill out, such as a vacation request or a new vendor, or any paper process being tracked on word docs, spreadsheets or word processing templates, it can be automated and put into a Smart Form and stored in DocLink.

For example, take the expense report mentioned above – with a DocLink Smart Form, employees can fill in the expense report electronically on their computer, phone or tablet. Errors are eliminated and rules are enforced since the Smart Form includes defined drop-down menus for each field and the employee cannot submit it until every field is completed. Once submitted, the expense report automatically gets routed to the designated approver without any manual processing by AP.

The customer mentioned above utilized a DocLink Smart Form which:

• allows employees to complete their expense report in minutes
• eliminates the 30-60 minutes it would take AP to process each report

Another customer recently wanted to use the Smart Form Tool Kit to automate their customer summaries. Instead of manually generating a list of outstanding balances for each customer in Word, they could use a Smart Form to automate the creation of this list every week from data already in DocLink and their Sage 300 ERP, saving AP several hours weekly.

The benefits of using DocLink Smart Forms are tangible, enabling you to:

1. streamline and structure so many of your typical business processes – a DocLink Smart Form can replace any Excel sheet, fillable PDF or even Word document that you use. Field completion can be enforced in a Smart Form, minimizing duplicate data entry and human errors.
2. create sophisticated electronic forms – we have customers capturing tens of fields in one document. We can replicate that with a DocLink Smart Form eliminating manual entry.
3. audit processed documents – You have full auditability of every process a document goes through. You can track where it is and its status, all of the approval stamps, and you can see who viewed the document and who approved it.
4. minimize data entry – There’s no need to manually enter data over and over again. For example, you can select the vendor from a drop-down menu and all default values for that vendor are automatically populated.
5. execute a process without needing an ERP license – In many companies not everyone making purchases needs to be in the ERP generating a PO. Many of our customers use a purchase requisition process and then import that into their Sage 300 ERP, eliminating the need for additional ERP licenses by using DocLink to create the purchase requisition.

Most importantly, DocLink’s Smart Form Toolkit provides you with a framework that enables you to create Smart Forms yourself. Many of our customers uses our professional services team to create them, but many also have created their own.

As you can see, the Smart Form Toolkit sets DocLink apart. Learn more about DocLink and what processes we can streamline for you. Contact us today for a demo.