AP Automation Made Easy with DocLink for Dynamics ERP (Video)

No department in any company is more strangled by data than AP. There’s too much paper, convoluted access to documents, and little, or no control, over day-to-day processes. This can make today’s hybrid working situation nearly impossible.

Find out how DocLink can extend the value of your Dynamics ERP to help you go paperless, enabling you to automate and streamline any manual business processes, starting with AP.

In this recorded webinar, learn how to :

• Eliminate paper-based bottlenecks like AP invoices & approvals
• Easily process non-PO and PO invoices, including automated 3-way matching
• View documents right within the Dynamics windows, no more chasing down paper
• Expand into expense reports, credit card statement and contracts when you are ready
• Support a remote workforce with Web and Mobile access

Watch to find out how DocLink can make it easy for you streamline your AP processes, improve productivity and reduce your costs for immediate ROI.

Transcript below:

Sherry: Good afternoon. My name is Sherry Bettencourt, and I’m a customer service associate here at Encore Business Solutions. We’re just going to give people a couple of minutes. People are actively joining today’s webinar, so we’re going to give people two minutes before we get started here. Thank you for your patience.

Okay. I think we’re ready to get going here. Good afternoon. My name is Sherry Bettencourt and I’m a customer service associate here at Encore Business Solutions. And I’d like to thank you for taking time out of your day to join us today for the AP Automation Made Easy with DocLink for Dynamics ERP webinar.

Before we begin, I just want to remind attendees that you are in listen-only mode today. But today’s event is being recorded, so you will receive a link of today’s webinar.

Today, we’ve invited Altec to show you DocLink, which is their document management and business process automation solution. And we feel that it’s a technology that you will find beneficial to your organization.

The goal today is to show you a more effective way of managing your everyday business processes by going paperless so that you can automate, streamline your critical AP business processes, and reduce costs. Hopefully, we can start to give you some ideas on how DocLink can help you improve productivity and gain better control, visibility, and security of your documents and your data.

So just a reminder today, this webinar is for you. So if you have any questions, feel free to type them into the chat or the Q&A section throughout today’s webinar as they come to you. And we will address those questions once we conclude today’s presentation. And now, I’m going to turn it over to Tim and Mark from Altec.

Tim: Great. And thank you so much. And good day everyone. Thank you for this opportunity to serve. We’d like to say, first and foremost, welcome to AP Automation Made Easy. As we progress through our slides here, I will be providing much of that content. And then about midway, we’ll take a bit of a break. And we’ll actually share the practicality and the power of DocLink. And Mark will be doing that as well. So we look forward to sharing this with you.

So let’s begin. If you don’t have much experience with document management, this will be perfect for you. Or if you’re well versed in document management, hopefully, this will provide a great basis for you to share this and go back to your co-workers and share with them how powerful DocLink is. So with that said, let’s go ahead and get started.

Basically, digital transformation is more important than ever. As we can see in our time, in this day and age, with COVID and all of the various things happening, the surge in technology is about helping companies, managing their data, documents, and processes better. We’ve also seen firsthand how becoming a digital business can help companies stay agile when dealing with these unprecedent times.

It’s about taking the friction out of your internal process and resulting in streamlining traditional-paper-based and data-entry-intensive processes, and paving the way for companies, like yourself, to achieve their strategic initiatives. In the world of document management, we tend to think about, first, the document that precedes the process. But at the end of the day, it’s about connecting the paper, your people, and your processes, and then the data so that you continue to do your work, whether you’re in the office or working remote.

So really quick, let’s take a quick poll. I find this pretty fun. It kind of helps us to see where we’re at. So we’d go ahead and begin there. So we’d like to give some thought to, what are your biggest challenges working in the office or remote? And what are those bottlenecks? Now keep in mind, as you look at the five different options, you can select more than one. There may be multiple ones that apply. So I’ll be quiet here for a moment to allow you to do so.

So what are we seeing so far?

Sherry: Things that a lot of people are having a lot of…too much paper seems to be top of the list there, along with manual and inefficient approval processes, and spending too much time doing data entry.

Tim: Okay. Well, perfect. Awesome. So can we give it a maybe a few more seconds or…? It’s complete? Awesome.

Sherry: Yep.

Tim: All right. So let’s begin with the next slide. So basically, this slide is meant to illustrate very quickly, it is not precise, and everything you see here to the exact number, not applicable to every company. But keep in mind that time and money are key drivers for AP automation. Most often, AP departments suffer from high AP transaction costs and cycle times, lack of visibility, granularity, seeing where that capital is within their process.

But research shows, for example, by the Ardent Partners, that AP automation is the best in class for accounts payable performance. By implementing something, being an AP process from like a DocLink solution, you’re significantly lowering the processing cost and the time per invoice as shown in this chart. When companies automate with AP, their AP invoice processing cost is approximately about 81% lower, which is significant, and processing cycle times are around, say, 73% faster than the traditional AP-based paper process that you’re currently utilizing.

Further research shows that the top initiatives by companies, when looking to streamline AP process or their AP process, is to go paperless and automate their workflow. Based upon survey results from the Institute of Financial Management, these two items emerged at the top of the list, meaning the top priorities for AP automation.

Number one was at the top of the list, a clear indication that many companies are still far from transitioning to processing invoices digitally, meaning 100% digital. And then, number two is another high priority for respondents to survey. Solutions were either in progress or scheduled to be implemented within the next three years.

The cost of touching a document is important to have this understanding. So let’s take a quick moment with this slide to maybe frame it up a bit. Couldn’t there be a better use of staff time and your resources than file, retrieve, and recreate documents as required or needed? Document management adds higher value to each task in your business process, liberate the wasted time and motion from your team to create a new synergy.

So let’s take a quick look and kind of show the practicality of DocLink and how that is actually affected one of our customers. SmartCity, following multiple mergers and acquisitions, is a leading provider of event technology services nationwide. The company wanted to take their approval processes for invoices from a manual, less efficient way to a more efficient way, and basically, with the ultimate goal of achieving go green or being 100% paperless.

The accounting department was challenged with managing the approval routing processes on a manual basis. Invoices were simply not moving quickly enough through their process. The company needed to await or route these invoices to the appropriate personnel without the risk of losing those important records in the process and to receive those approvals back in a timely fashion without it getting stuck on the proverbial desk.

With DocLink, they’re entirely processed today, which means entirely paperless today. All of their accounting records are now available to access virtually. And because everything is electronic, items can no longer be delayed when on someone’s desk or lost there, inadvertently, or thrown into the trash.

As a communications company, SmartCity is required to store invoices for a longer period of time than most companies. And now, they can apply simple access to everything using the DocLink product.

So summarizing, what does this really mean? They were able to trim down their footprint, physical footprint, or their filing cabinets by 40 cabinets. The approval delays were cut by 90%, basically, from 5 days down to 1 day. They saved hundreds of hours keying in that same data or even keying in data. They eliminated the need to print file 4000 pages. And then the audit savings was incredible. Their searching for the files was reduced from days down to hours, even mere minutes, as a result of having the DocLink solution.

So let’s take a quick look at, in the world of AP, what are the basic elements? And here on your screen are four of them we’ll be using today: visibility, collaboration, control, and automation. And we’ll take a quick review of each of them at a very high level.

So let’s start with visibility. Visibility is basically going into the liabilities and the operating expenses and the basic requirements for most major functions within any enterprise organization. It is used to give an overall view of operations and establish standards on which to base strategies for performance improvement. It is also a key factor in giving AP department a higher degree of influence as a strategic partner in a business.

Collaboration. Collaboration is a cross-functional coordination amongst key stakeholders, that visibility that I mentioned earlier, such as accounts payable, procurement, finance, treasury, and suppliers, creates an environment where key information flows easily between these stakeholders.

Let’s talk about control. Good audit controls help organizations enforce corporate policies and they achieve contract compliance. File controls ensure that the AP transactions are processed in a way that complies with policies, procedures, and regulations.

Then lastly, let’s talk about automation. Technology solutions to manage invoices and workflow, as well as electronic payment methods, reduce the inefficiency of manual and paper-based processes. Automation is a critical foundation to lowering costs and streamlining each of the AP sub-processes.

So this resounding question may be on everyone’s mind. But we’ll just kind of share here from a thought-provoking perspective is, how does DocLink work for AP automation? So let’s take a quick look at this next slide, which is a visual diagram.

DocLink has the ability to connect the right people at the right time with the right documents to effectively do their critical work. It streamlines operations and gives back controls of documents, data, and then, of course, the transactions. It delivers documents outside of the business to partners and customers, or allows those same people to access that data, that information, as security permissions permit, via an access of a self-service portal, which we call Web Client. Lastly, DocLink fulfills your complete document management cycle and paperless initiatives, paving the way to enable your achievement of your strategic initiatives.

So this slide is meant to help, but a bit more interactive from a standpoint of, what does DocLink do? What can it do? So let’s go ahead and begin.

In the center here, these circles are meant to represent the DocLink repository. Keep in mind that this repository, being DocLink, is agnostic in nature, by document, types, and sizes. And what I mean by document type is that you can store any document, whatever that we created digitally, within the document repository. It’s not important to where it came from, or the document type, nor is the size, obviously, depending upon your server resources, to how it set documents. But it enables you, as long as you have the native application, to open up at DocLink. You can’t retrieve it out of DocLink.

Next, these flags will share some bits of functionality or aspects that are key in the nature of the DocLink products. Let’s start with capturing. The items that are listed here are meant to share the different capturing methods that are available to capture any document type or size and bring that within the repository being DocLink.

This next slide talks about process, and what we’re sharing here is basically your process, your configurable workflow as you design it, your analytics, we can actually put them within the system if you can write it down. We can actually put it in here electronically in your drive, your documents through your desired life cycle through what we call a workflow or automated rally.

This is very powerful because this speeds documents along the various processes that you have in mind, moving that data and that document into your ERP system, and back as transactional changes occur. That’s the connection to your ERP system, keeping note that is bidirectional in nature.

So once you’ve had the documents and it’s moving throughout this process, you will need to deliver that document to your customer, whether it’s internal or external. Here’s some common methods to do so.

Then finally wrapping everything up. How do you access information? What are some common methodologies to do so? So our search and retrieval, the documents is basically putting that document, that data, at your fingertips and being able to search that within the DocLink solution. Here are some common methods that we can actually reach out and do that, so Web Client, Smart Client, and then Mobile. Note that the Mobile comes in iOS or Android.

So another question that’s kind of a big thing on people’s minds at this point is wondering, why do I start in AP? Now here is a bit of our perspective on that.

AP is heavily reliant on paper, making it nearly impossible to operate in remote capacity. And we found that remote access has become almost a paramount need. And being able to access that information is very critical, especially in a timely fashion.

AP has a very tangible and obvious ROI because of all the paper inefficiencies it can experience as a department. This is why most DocLink opportunities start in the AP department.

The efficiencies of the AP process relies on the time to process an invoice, and then the cost to process that invoice. This is why we generally find the AP department is a logical place to start. Most of our customers start in AP before expanding to other departments, like HR, or contract management, and so forth.

There are three major benefits to using DocLink to automate your accounts payable process: the ability to provide self-service document access, timely approvals from anywhere, and the elimination of filing and minimization of tedious data entry. Ultimately, these contribute to a huge win for streamline approvals and, again, that seamless integration into your ERP system.

This screen is meant to illustrate a typical payables process. Note this may not be exact to yours, but note that this is one that we see often or many processes that can exist within an AP department. So we’ll travel through the lifecycle of an invoice. And with that, this is meant to help us illustrate that.

So let’s get started with electronic invoicing and invoice workflow. Here’s a diagram that illustrates a typical AP process to simply demonstrate the benefits that once you deploy DocLink, what will actually change within that process? How many of these things do you think are in your mind could it remove or enhance? Take a look at the next slide.

Wow. That’s quite a few that it’s been reduced down to. So as you’re looking, you can see all the tasks that can be eliminated, all the manual and tedious and time-consuming tasks. There are also areas of your process that are inefficient and are susceptible to error. As a result of deploying the DocLink solution, you can see the optimization that has occurred.

Vendors can submit invoices in a variety of different ways. With an automated AP process, the DocLink automatically extracts relevant data into the system. When the designated administrator receives notification that the invoice is received, and then it flows through its usual workflow and its approval process, DocLink essentially mimics your current workflow, which is established with a predetermined electronic approval process, as I’d shared earlier. And you can have as many approvers as you want based upon your business needs. Approval times are significantly decreased as a result to deploying such a strategy.

The process is transformed from manual and laborious to fast and efficient with complete visibility and control of the documents, and hence, the transaction. And what does this really mean at the end of the day? The results are basically 100% elimination, should you choose to go there, from a paper invoice standpoint. The approval times are reduced. And the impact is streamlining your process, driving efficiency, and going after more strategic activities.

And so what does that really mean at the end of the day? Well, it basically means one of five things. You can go after early pay discounts, if they’re applicable, avoid late fees, go without adding a headcount, and do more with less, and then, finally, empower the remote workforce.

So with that said, let’s turn it over and see the practicality and the power of DocLink. And I will turn it over to Mark.

Mark: All right. Thanks, Tim.

Tim: And there you go, Sir.

Mark: Yeah. Just give me one second here to make sure I show them the right screen. And we should be set. And, Tim, if you don’t mind, just give me a virtual thumbs up, if you will, to let me know if you can see my screen okay.

Tim: I’ll do better than that. I can absolutely see it.

Mark: Excellent. Thanks. So when we think of DocLink, in the API automation realm, it’s more about not just going paperless first, but also doing more behind the scenes with automation. Paperless gets you there because you can’t really automate paper processes.

So the first thing is to, well, digitize. And if you have goals to go paperless, you might as well automate while you’re at it because DocLink [inaudible 00:21:11]. When we think of API automation, we think of invoicing. We can also think of purchase orders, packing slips, and other components around that, but really focus around the invoicing aspect. But just keep in mind that any document within DocLink can be turned paperless and automated through.

With invoices, they typically come in via email. They also come in via paper. However that comes in today in your current business process, those can be brought into DocLink. Probably the most common anymore is invoices via email. But if it’s still paper, and your de-enveloping, scan those first. Those will drop right into DocLink for routing and automation.

Here we’re just showing emails. So if you have an email inbox that’s designated as your inbox for invoices, that’s great. We can link right to that, regardless of what your current email is. And we’ll bring those documents directly into DocLink.

If your suppliers are sending multiple invoices in one PDF. And you have to go through this process of printing all those out, separating them with all your invoicing, invoice documents that are multiple pages, you don’t have to do that any longer. DocLink is smart enough and intelligent enough to automate that process as well. So we’re really just going to look at the invoice or invoices that are attached via email and bring those directly into the digital repository.

What happens next is an automated extraction process. Now, this is OCR. And OCR has been around for a very long time. But it hasn’t always been extremely useful. Where it’s most useful is when we incorporate intelligence and machine learning into that. And that’s what DocLink has done here.

So when an invoice comes in, first and foremost, you can see reporting elements and dashboards on, you know, what’s the validity of the documents? How fast are my employees working to validate the data, if it doesn’t happen automatic through that process? What’s the accuracy, automation rates, user productivity? All of these are part of a dashboard that are included in the product.

If the system doesn’t automate all the way through as 100% straight through processing rate, we get to what we call data verification and validation. I’m just going to bring up a document or two just to highlight what this looks like from a user standpoint. Think of this as the data that you no longer have to enter into your Dynamics ERP.

Whether it’s a PO-based invoice or a non-PO-based voucher invoice, we can capture all that data from header, footer, and line-item information. And that’s what’s really going on right here.

We can see that the system is looking at vendor information on the invoice. There’s invoice number, PO number, and line-item information, the detail level. We’re also going to grab subtotal, tax, shipping, and total.

This one grabbed everything perfectly. And we can see that by a green checkmark on the left-hand side here. The second one didn’t grab everything 100% because in this particular case, we have a new vendor in the system. So what we want to do is actually train the system to be better for the next time. When a new advanced office systems invoice comes in for the next time, it’s going to have that learn in the system and it will scrape through, process that document, if everything stays the same.

The way I do that is I select the box for vendor. And I go ahead on the right-hand side here where we see Advanced Office System and I click that box. Just with a single click of the mouse, we’ve now populated that vendor information where we see that in green. It’s captured every character perfectly, and I don’t have to do anything to change anything there.

We can grab the dates, the invoice number. This one doesn’t have a PO number on it, so we can skip that. What it’s also going to do is grab our subtotal, tax, shipping, and then do calculations on that to make sure that the sum of those values equal our amount due, and then validate that by doing a cross-reference on what was captured down below in the total.

The same thing is gonna happen on the item information. We can see our item number, our description, quantity unit, and line total. We’re gonna do a quantity times unit price calculation to get our line total that we get.

At this point, we’re all set because everything is in green. So I go ahead and click Submit. By doing so, I actually train the system at that point to say, “Here’s what we can get based on the vendor profile.” And it’s going to be smarter for the next time it comes in. Think of it as an exponential curve. We may not be good at the first time. It’s going to learn everything at that point. For a time, it’s going to get better and better and better as you process more of those documents through.

What happens next is we push that into a workflow process. So what that looks like is actually, if I log in as this user. We’re going to log in as an AP user for this particular process.

This is where we kind of split through things out based on, is it a PO-based invoice or is it non-PO-based invoice? And DocLink is gonna do that determination for you. You don’t have to even think about it. It was their PO from that OCR standpoint, when the document gets first analyzed, and DocLink is going to take it from there.

We can see also that we have, in this case, a couple PO-based invoices. We can take a look at some of these and say, “Well, hey, what do we need to do next here?” So we’re going to say, let’s just grab one of these documents, and all of our metadata that we care about, so PO, vendor number, vendor name. All those are here for us, and we can look at those documents and send it to where it needs to go next.

This is really similar to, if you had a piece of paper in front of you, then you went to your filing cabinet and said, “Well, I have a bunch of these lines that I need to validate and match the PO and maybe a packing slip or two.” I go to my filing cabinet, pull those out, look at them, and make sure everything matches correctly.

Well, what it DocLink does is it does this automatically. So in this case, it says, “Look at this invoice. Let’s go back into DocLink. Let’s look at POs, look at our receipts, in some capacity, and then send it to where it needs to go next.” In that case, it’s going to say, “Great. This was 100% matched PO.” Let’s send it to PO Matched. So it’s going to go there.

And if we look at the PO Matched status, we now have the ability to look at the invoice plus all the supporting documents. Again, DocLink is doing this all automatically. But you also have the ability to look at these documents manually, if you’d like.

So what we’re going to do is we’re going to minimize this form up above. And we’re also going to do is switch this to tile vertically. That allows us to view all the documents in a panel where we can see them all in a nice grid view. And this really taken the place of going and looking at your pockets of documents in your filing cabinet.

And again, you know, we have the ability now to do automated through your match. So although we can look at this, DocLink has made a determination that this is a matched pocket of documents. We don’t need to do anything.

If those documents are a match, DocLink does then takes everything and it takes all the metadata that was extracted from OCR, and it pushes that into your Dynamics ERP. That might be Dynamics GP, NAV, Dynamics BC, and D365 F&O. Whatever it might be today, we’re going to use basically the exact same process to do the matching backend, push that data, and sync it with your ERP.

If there’s any sort of discrepancy, so if you were…the total amount is off by a threshold that you deemed appropriate for the automated process, DocLink throws it into a price discrepancy workflow state. If it’s a discrepancy, a line item, and it says are 10 widgets that were purchased that we expected to get in. Now, we’re being billed for 20 widgets. That’s a discrepancy. So we throw it in this workflow state. So you can see all the discrepancies and all the different variations of the discrepancies, we can see here.

Now, we can send that to an approval process to say, “Do we want someone to overwrite that or is it okay as is?” Maybe we need to send that document back to our supplier to say, “Hey, you overbilled us.” Or, “You know what? We’re going to be waiting on 10 more widgets until I approve the invoice” and that process to say, “Yes, this is okay to go.”

All that’s in this process of what DocLink would consider a workflow. That’s what we just consider moving a document through its process flow, either manual through an approval process or automated through the matching process. And at any given time, where we say, and tell the document to push back into the ERP, DocLink does that.

This works a little bit differently with non-PO-based invoices. What we’re doing is we’re taking the same document and extracting all the data in that OCR process. We’re doing something similar in the forms where we want to look at the process flow and basically treat it as a voucher invoice.

So what that looks like is, if we minimize the document for a little bit, and we’re going to enable that form view. Basically, what we’re doing is we’re mimicking the process of that voucher, by how you would enter it into the ERP. This is going to be some form of distribution online. So if you have a phone bill, and you have 100 lines, this is where you would do that. If you had a ton of lines, and it’s always the same, then we can template that out.

So there’s a lot of automation that’s built in. Maybe, that you have today, where you’re writing distributions on a piece of paper, before your send it to one or many approvers. And we can see that DocLink pretty much has template this out. So the next step in the process is to send to an approver or two and move that document along that process flow.

So if we go back to remembering the slide about, you know, a document before DocLink takes about 17 days to approve. With DocLink, it takes about 3.9 days. We’re kind of doing this process, really, as quickly as you can handle it. If users are seeing documents as part of their workflow, you know, they’re doing this pretty much immediately. And documents can take, you know, even down to minutes, to process through that process flow.

From a user standpoint, what that looks like, as soon as we move that document along, we’re gonna jump over to a quick approval here. Users are not forced to go into DocLink by any means to do their approval process. They can actually get their documents sent via email and they can do an email approval that way. What that does is make it super simple for a user to make a determination on if they need to touch a document now or not.

So if a document is due tomorrow, yeah, we may need to send that as a priority document, our CFO based on a digital authority, gets that notification saying, “Hey, a document is waiting for you. It’s determined as priority, please approve it.”

So they come in here, they click that Approve button. And they’ve now digitally signed that document. They go and hit that Approve for Posting link. And we move that document along.

Just like any document, when it’s ready to be synced into the ERP, we move it into a ready-for-import state and DocLink sends it and to do that automatically. So on an interval, maybe once a day, once an hour, whatever your determination is, DocLink is going to be sending it to the ERP. And it’s going to be sending in regularly, so you don’t have to do that manually.

Pretty much anything now with DocLink is an automated process. We never have to worry about that being a, you know, “Click here to import that in.” That used to be what it was. But now we’ve automated everything from approval and to import.

What we’re left with is a process where we take all the data from DocLink. We create the transaction. In this case, we’re using Dynamics GP to create a payables transaction. And all that data has flowed in here. I don’t have to manually create that transaction because DocLink did that for us behind the scenes.

Now, DocLink is part of the integration that you get when you… Purchase DocLink is a couple of different things. One, we have the ability to pull data into a DocLink from GP. We also have the ability to push data from DocLink back into the ERP. And DocLink also gives you the ability to look and monitor everything that you’re doing in the ERP.

So if something changed here, we need to update that. DocLink is monitoring that and it’s going to update the document accordingly. But it’s also going to do, on top of that, is it gives you the ability to one-click view documents.

So even if we’re in a web browser, and your ERP is on premise today, DocLink can work with that. If your ERP is in the cloud, DocLink can also be in the cloud. We can work with that. So it’s a hybrid solution where DocLink can be whatever you want it to be – on-premise, in the cloud, whatever it might be.

So one click based on the voucher number, vendor ID, and the document number, I found that document here. And we can say, “Yes, here’s our document or documents that relate to that transaction.”

There are multiple windows that DocLink can transact in. So in this case, we have Payables Transaction Inquiry by vendor. And I can actually select whatever document or transaction that I want. Go to Additional View Documents and we can select a different document and populate it in our grid view or the document view here as well.

Last little bit before I push it back to Tim is just the ability to do search and retrieval within DocLink without the need to go back to the ERP. Not all users have access to the ERP. Not all users do. But most users want access to documents in some fashion, whether it’s AP, purchasing, even users that are doing other things beyond AP. We can do that here.

So a couple examples that make things really easy for DocLink to find is, what if, let’s say we wanted to find all invoices for a certain vendor, in this case, Advanced Office Systems. We can save a search to do that. Select our document type, all of our properties that relate to the vendor code or vendor name, Advanced Office Systems, click on Search. And now we can do a quick couple of second of find all those documents in the system. And here we go. DocLink has found, you know, however many documents in the sea or ocean of documents that relate to that.

Instead of going to your filing cabinet and maybe finding, you know, all the documents that were laid and how you sorted and grouped them today, pretty much guarantee DocLink can find it faster than any physical filing system.

I like to use this one as an example for exactly that. What if we wanted to find all invoices over a certain date range over $10,000, right? What if we had to do that with paper today? How difficult would that be? Pretty much impossible, it might take a group of people an entire day to do this.

In DocLink we can simply say, “Look at all of our documents or AP document invoices with document total greater than $10,000.” And again, go ahead and click on Search to find that document or documents quickly and efficiently here.

We’ve searched millions of documents in the repository. We found six that equal that exact request that I just made. So we now have our documents digitally at our fingertips.

This is really nice when your auditors come in and they request a document or a couple that fit that mold. You know, as opposed to displaying all your documents out from banker boxes out into a, you know, desk for two and a have to put those all away after the auditor comes in. Well, we can give access to the auditor and focus their attention on all the documents that they request. And they can be on their way in the matter of, you know, minutes, hours, maybe days, and no longer a week-long process to do so. And there’s no mess after all those. So DocLink can help in that aspect as well.

That’s all I prepared for you all today. I appreciate that. I’m going to give control back to Tim for him to finish off the presentation. Thanks for your time.

Tim: Thank you, Mark. I appreciate you sharing that.

Now, if you recall, early on in the presentation, we did share that if you do have some questions, feel free to put it in the chat. And we’ll cover those at the end of the presentation. So while it’s fresh in your mind, feel free to do so about the demonstration Mark or the portion that Mark had just shared.

All right. So Mark, can you confirm that my screen is showing again, please?

Mark: You’re plugged in.

Tim: Perfect. Thank you. All right, so with that said, let’s cover the remaining slides we have.

So look at this, we have a poll. So let’s go ahead and talk about this poll for a moment. And basically, what we’re doing here is trying to have an understanding of how the AP automation, should you take the DocLink experience and insert that within your organization, how do you feel that will affect your organization? Is there a value associated with that? Keep in mind, much like the other polls, you can select one, two or several or whatever all applies… I’m excited to see what people are saying about this particular one.

Sherry: Votes are coming in. We’ve got, so far, 33% remote access to documents, overall time savings, rural cost savings, and meeting strategic needs. But so far, 70% of attendees have voted. So we’ll give it a couple of seconds here for the remainder.

Tim: Awesome, all-powerful needs, if you will, and definitely, we’ll look forward to, hopefully in the later time, sharing more of the DocLink experience.

Sherry: Okay. So it seems that remote access to documents is the number one.

Tim: And that makes sense given the current climate. Okay. Perfect. Thank you, guys.

So with that said, let’s begin our next slide. So regardless of how a document comes into your business, you can safely capture, as Mark has shared, the image, and index its data automatically using the OCR product that Mark has shared during this portion. DocLink has a wide variety of capture methodologies and ways to repurpose that data to eradicate the manual, tedious portion of data entry, save time on reconciliations and matching.

If you are a PO-heavy in your organization, an automated matching will likely be the key. No more manually matching the invoice to the packing slip, to the PO, to leverage the system to do that for you. And basically, demanding by the exception rather than the normality of the day in the invoice.

Because of the integration that DocLink has with the ERP system, there are lots of additional opportunities to minimize data entry. For example, inputting vendor codes, this will bring up the vendors name. Default account codes can be used. Templates for invoices can be coded to multiple GL account codes.

This is about reducing that human error that we spoke about earlier on through each step of the way, improve your overall accuracy by reducing human error and forgetfulness on the due dates. Given that it’s automated, it just automatically happens in many cases. So as the initiation portion starts, it drives to the process and concludes at the end. So take advantage of any early pay discounts by avoiding those late fees.

And maybe a few other benefits we can talk about very quickly is, you’re able to repurpose the data from your ERP system, be able to capture GL coding and no longer having to input it, and then autoindexing is very powerful, minimizing how to reclass entries, correcting an entry when new data has come in, making sure that your ERP system remains that one source of truth, editing on the ERP and have it flow over, elimination of duplication, extra keystrokes, which seems to be a resounding thing that we’ve shared numerous times in this presentation so far today, and then, finally, filtering GL coding by manager.

So monitoring workflow statuses of documents and tracking those pending documents stuck in workflows. Often data is sometimes still in a workflow process within DocLink and hasn’t quite hit the ERP system yet. And when it’s stuck within those workflow approvals, if you will, this helps to prevent those early pay discounts that I mentioned early on.

Manage audit trails and changes from your team, improve financial reporting by generating monthly reports – past due, paid, anything in that process – and viewing when you’re not in the ERP system, streamlining intercompany accounting regardless of multiple locations, or even multiple departments, these are all key things that you can expect that will be improved by deploying the DocLink solution.

So to the top of the questions, after we’ve talked through some of those other things that are commonly asked, the next most popular thing is security. This is often asked throughout the sale cycle is, can I grant specific rights to specific users? The answer is a resounding yes. Permissions are given on a per-user basis to documents and data which can be filtered through any number of criteria including company, department, document type, and property values.

So how about if you could grant your customers and vendors access to these documents based upon your restrictions? Think about that for a moment, how much more that would provide from a self-sufficient standpoint to drive your process forward? How much time would you save on answering questions or increase customer satisfaction by allowing them to self-service access those documents?

Let’s talk about AP automation and another customer success story. So this particular customer, Econo, they have 600 employees. They have five stores in Puerto Rico. They have a 30,000-square foot at each location. And they’re possibly $110 million in revenue. They operate under a license and a trademark agreement with Econo Supermarkets, kind of the largest supermarket chain in Puerto Rico.

They found that using DocLink by Altec, at a convention back in 2011, I believe. And their challenges were pretty common in some ways, and others very unique. Everywhere they looked, they just had too much paper. Moving facilities demonstrated the need to go paperless. And HR, as a just cause jurisdiction, they had to create so many documents for each of their 600-plus employees.

So how are they using DocLink today? They have done two major integrations with DocLink since. First, as I had mentioned, is commonplace people start is the AP, exactly what this company did. DocLink was implemented and running in one week.

Obviously, this isn’t always the case. But note that that was a superior time to go to implementation. And in less than two months, they were fully integrated within their ERP application.

DocLink solved their paper issue for them. They installed digital signature, captured devices for the vendors, and their employees to sign, basically, the POs, the receivers, and invoices.

The second phase was HR, which was approximately two years later. HR was also mired down in paper with resumes, applications, benefit forms, W-4s, I-9s, employee reviews, and payroll stubs, just to name a few things. But for Econo, it was more difficult as Puerto Rico, again, as I shared earlier, was a just cause jurisdiction. And what that really means is to fire an employee or to let them go, they basically had to demonstrate just cause or pay a hefty severance package.

DocLink allow them to automate their process by creating three major workflows for those documents I’d shared on the HR side – resume review, time-off requests, and employee events. The benefit of doing this was DocLink basically stopped their use of paper at the AP side, as well as the HR. So they went paperless, as I’ve shared.

That allowed them to go from eight employees within the AP team, two offices and five stores, to just four employee, so it basically optimized their environment, and a manager. Not only did it save time, that allowed them to establish a webpage to manage cost differences in invoices, the supplier to send the number of the check, and the invoice number, or PO number, or receiver number, in this particular case. And from there, they can get all the documents that justify the cause they’re paying because they have all the data now. And it’s basically at the touch of a button.

With DocLink on the HR side, they will be much more effective and efficient with everything being digital. Onboarding is easy using online forms, which can be used to capture employee information. And the e-signatures are used to authenticate during the onboarding process. Now new hires can review complete and legally sign all the onboarding paperwork online for their first day on the job. How powerful is that?

Basically, they’re streamlining their HR process, reducing the stress on their new employees. They completed an onboarding packet. Those completed onboarding packets can be routed to any number of parties like payroll, hiring managers, send them back to their DynaFile for quality check. Once approved, all those onboarding documents are electronically filed in the employee’s folder. By removing the pen and paper roadblocks, HR can stop generating paper and operate much smoother than they’ve been able to before.

So another area they’re able to add some value to was employee certifications and achievements, so much easier with DocLink. They’re able to stay up to date with informed with immediate access to technical questions about legal requirements and audit reports to ensure all employee documentation is closed, or complete, and up to date.

Accessibility is also easy with DocLink, as Mark has shared during the demonstration portion. The HR management team have instant access to all employees’ files, obviously with security permissions. And they can troubleshoot instantaneously. And employees can take ownership of their HR needs and access their documentation online as well.

So we’ll have a quick review of this particular case study, AAA. They’re looking to basically eliminate paper, have better communication as an organization, amongst all the different locations. And as you can see on the screen, there’s some really hefty numbers by way of percentages to what they were able to accomplish. So basically, the results were accountability for timely approvals, taking advantage of early discounts, and then quick reimbursement on expense reports.

So, how can DocLink impact everyone within your organization? That’s a great question. For those of you who are familiar with DocLink, you may already know about our AP automation solution, and we’ll cover that again shortly. But you are considering doc management for your organization. Is it better to select a solution that can be used for a greater business process more than just the AP side at this time and date?

Often, that’s where companies start. But what is the modularity or the growth potential of that solution impacting everyone within your organization? Where do those documents and paper-based processes cost me the most frustration, meaning you, and other key personnel within your company? And what is the associated costs or missed opportunity costs? Let’s explore some of those together.

This slide very quickly shares a few different departments of ways and how it can impact those departments. So keep in mind this is not complete in its entirety. But it is something to begin the thought-provoking process, to create that forward thinking.

And I’ll share a few questions as you’re looking over these bullets. So, how much time across your organization are you wasting dealing with Excel-based and paper receipts for expense reports? What would it mean if you can have remote access to documents when your employees are out visiting with other customers?

I’m working with my clients. I’m asking these fundamental questions. These are simplified, but I think it’s important for the context we’re considering document management for your organization today. What documents are giving you the most amount of pain?

Remember that document management, when we look at it, it’s things that are generally from perspective the document that precedes the process. Do these documents in question need to travel around your organization for approval or be routed outside of the organization?

This is really asking about the workflow the DocLink, for us to have a better understanding, of how we can expect that system to be configured to meet your needs. Do they impact the transaction? This is speaking to the integration we have with various ERP systems. Mark had noted a few today.

Lastly, who will need to search and retrieve those documents? What security parameters do they need? And from where? The ERP screen? DocLink via web or mobile? And that mobile being, again, iOS or Android.

So, in conclusion, why would you choose DocLink? Obviously, there could be a number of things that we can mention. But some of the common, most valuable things customers have shared with us back in surveys is that we have world-class products with seamless and deep integration into your ERP system.

We have SmartForms capabilities for unique processes to tailor that interaction or that interface for those end users, to optimize their time, mobile access, as we shared a few times, and then document capture flexibility that Mark shared, which was extremely powerful on the OCR side. And then, ultimately, at the end of the day, a configurablely automated delivery system, so we can match it to meet your needs, specifically.

Another powerful pillar that we can speak to is rapid implementations with a rapid time to benefit as we deliver on time, on budget, through a proven methodology, with a team of knowledgeable and helpful experts. And then, lastly, outstanding customer support.

So we’re just not dropping it into your company, into your system, making the connections and walking away, we have an outstanding customer support system that’s available 24/7, 365 days. Our team is not only able to help with support tickets and software issues, but they also conduct monthly educational webinars to continue that educational process to bring more power to your team or the usefulness of the DocLink investment.

So with that said, let’s go have our final poll. So this has meant, in just a bit, but also in some seriousness, why are you attending today’s session? Again, feel free to select as many as you wish, but it’s always nice to see some of the feedback.

All right, so I’m excited. What are we seeing?

Sherry: Okay. We’re getting some great feedback here. Knowledge building and we could definitely use this, contact me.

Tim: Awesome. Good. That’s great to hear. Now, are we 100% done in receiving all the polls?

Sherry: Not yet we’re still waiting on a few people. Let’s give it a few more seconds here for people to log their response.

Tim: Okay.

Sherry: Okay. Yeah, those are definitely the two top responses.

Tim: Wonderful. All right. So with that said, let’s wrap this up with our final slide. We want you to think in an introspective way, are you ready to go digital and achieve your paperless goals and visions, or maybe a hybrid of that starting out with some automation and eventually working to fully digital, meaning paperless? DocLink offers a wide range of options that help you with AP or any enterprise-wide projects and initiatives.

Let’s keep the conversation going for more moments. And obviously, this was a very high-level presentation of DocLink that can help increase your efficiencies and solve many problems. But we do appreciate the opportunity to engage with each of you about your specific AP needs and, basically, share that functionality in a personalized demonstration.

So with that said, on the slides, you do have some contact information. Feel free to reach out to your contact at Encore. And we look forward to meeting you.

Sherry: Okay. Tim and Mark, thank you very much. I think we can all see that adding DocLink will definitely save time and paper by automating the AP business processes. We do have a couple of questions. Do we have a couple of minutes to address those?

Tim: Sure.

Sherry: Okay. So the first one is, does the invoice PDF save in Dynamics automatically as part of the process or are the invoices stored in DocLink?

Tim: Mark, would you like…?

Mark: I could do that. Yeah, I’ll take that one? Yeah. So the documents are always stored in DocLink, the data flows and syncs into the ERP. But DocLink itself is the digital repository, so everything is stored in there.

Sherry: Okay. Great. Another question here. When an invoice comes in and has a preset approver attached, does AP still get a chance to review it before the invoice is forwarded to the approver? For example, if the invoices by chance is incorrect, the PO does not have match? Do they get to review it first?

Mark: Yeah, of course, the business processes are different across all organizations. I’ve seen anything and everything. And the nice thing about DocLink is that it’s very much configurable to your needs. So just because someone else’s process maybe, you know, the opposite of that exact scenario, it doesn’t mean that DocLink cannot handle that.

So, yeah, a review can happen before it gets moved, you know, automatically. We can put checkpoints in place to have a blend of a manual review with, you know, automation [inaudible 00:58:11].

Sherry: Perfect. Okay, we have two more questions here. For OCR, does the invoice number have to be in the same place on the invoice from every vendor?

Mark: Absolutely not. To expect that would be to miss the whole point of OCR and its intelligence. So every template from every vendor is slightly different, and that’s where the intelligence building comes into place.

A lot of other solutions require you to template every vendor. So when you get a new one in, there’s some work by an individual that has to be done prior for it to work, you know, automated.

But our solution is not that. We don’t even really allow you to create templates. It’s just going to be learning over time based on all those data points, wherever they might land on the layout of that place.

Sherry: Okay. Thank you. And very last question here. If you don’t get the OCR module, how do you manually index your documents?

Mark: Yeah, so we have tools that can basically allow for you to drag and drop documents directly into DocLink. We can still monitor email and drop them into the repository. That’s not going to include the intelligence of OCR, but it can still be done in a semi-automatic way.

Sherry: Okay. Fantastic. Okay, well, that concludes the questions. And we are finished right on the hour. So thank you everybody for joining today. You will receive a link with a recording, so if there’s anything you want to go back and review. And we will be following up, and if you have any questions, that can be answered. Enjoy the rest of your day.