Why Does Your Business Need Document Automation in 2024?

Document management has several obstacles, such as increased paperwork, decreasing profit margin, and making your business less sustainable. Around 80% of this data is unstructured, making it a significant concern. This growing volume of unstructured data poses a challenge, and managing it offers little incentive for the human workforce.

With that backdrop, here's where Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) comes in. This piece will explore some of the benefits of document processing automation and how to leverage it to grow your business. 

So, let’s jump right into it:-

Document automation: a brief introduction

The number of documents an organization needs to generate, manage, and store increases and becomes overwhelming when the manual creation and management of documents are still in place. Document automation is powerful, and eases concerns by automating document processing along with simplifying the creation and management of large volumes of content.

How document automation can benefit your workflow

Some of the benefits that document automation features bring to your business tasks include the following:

A. Saves time

Time-consuming manual processes take away the strength of a team from fruitful work. Automated document processing saves time by cutting paperwork, eliminating misinterpretation, and improving efficiency.

B. Decreased probability of errors

When business professionals generate documents from the ground up or compile new documents by copy-pasting from various sources, omissions or mistakes are more likely. Document automation addresses these concerns with precise document templates.

C. Improves consistency

Human errors are inevitable while processing documents. Because these documents are vital to a business, the mistakes cause substantial financial and reputational damage. Document automation ensures that the details are accurate from the outset, enabling users to apply the same templates to all documents after.

D. Enhances productivity

Employees executing repetitive tasks, such as printing, sorting, and organizing documents, diminish productivity over time. Companies incorporating document automation free up time and allow employees to take up more high-value and revenue-generating projects.

What are the use cases with specific document types?

Intelligent document processing eliminates manual labor in banking, logistics, finance, insurance, government, and healthcare sectors. Automation empowers document management with actionable data to manage document processing in:

A. Contracts

Businesses typically handle high volumes of standard, legally-binding contracts. Templated agreements generated automatically quickly move contracts to the signature process with minimal back and forth. Incorporating an esignature further streamline this process, allowing parties to sign documents swiftly and securely from anywhere in the world.

B. Invoices 

Invoices are transaction logs and also legal documents containing seller and client names and payment terms. Automating invoices decreases the risk of incorrect data, payment delays, or erroneous payments to the wrong vendor.

C. Tax forms 

The sheer volume of paperwork involved in administering taxes, social security, and the census is daunting to any business. Automatically classifying huge volumes of forms according to specified settings helps avoid tax debt penalties and repercussions from the federal government. 

D. Identity & income verification documents

ACORD forms take time to scan and analyze, causing delays in underwriting. At the same time, errors in processing bank statements could result in bank lawsuits and legal charges. Automating these income verification documents gives visibility into financial stability and accelerates the verification processes.

E. Lease abstracts 

Leases are extensive and elaborate. Vital information may be lost or forgotten among the numerous sheets of paper. Automation finds this information by browsing several sheets and locating the necessary portions.

F. Rent rolls

A rent roll is a key report in property management to formulate the value of income property. Processing unstructured data for rent rolls in bulk makes it easier to extract information on properties that warrant an increase in, undervalued properties worth investing in, or red flags that call for attention. 

G. Bill of lading

BL documents, also called bills of lading, call for less complicated tracking, tracing, and archiving. Your logistics operations run more efficiently by automating a bill of lading processing with ready-made APIs and integrations.

‍Overcoming barriers to adopting document processing: what's holding you back?

The organizational resistance to adopting new systems boils down to seven reasons:

‍A. Lack of awareness

Technology moves fast. Sometimes businesses fail to keep track of technical advancements happening in their industries that keeps them from adopting automation. Understanding intelligent document processing helps businesses reduce dependence on their workforce and diversify into new products and services. As they step into the world of document automation, they understand how it makes their operations more agile, efficient, and flexible.

B. Resistance to change

Resistance to automation stagnates business and prevents success. Failure to move toward document automation spells doom for a business sooner than later. The way forward is to build momentum toward more significant automation efforts that are easy to set up, work with, and make the changes as frictionless as possible.

C. Perception of cost

The perception of cost is another hindrance while setting up an IDP solution. However, when organizations with large volumes of unstructured data invest in an intelligent document processing system, it leads to substantial cost savings over time.

D. Limited Resources

Implementation requires a high upfront cost and routine maintenance, which makes it challenging for smaller firms with limited resources. Not focusing one's limited resources on core document processing competencies costs the business and stalls growth.

E. Misalignment with business goals

Misalignment of business goals leads to unnecessary costs and hinders success.

It's possible to venture on a digital transformation journey only by identifying one's business goals and objectives to decide the focus.

F. Legacy systems

Legacy systems and outdated software limit the ability of an existing system to integrate with modern solutions. This limitation in legacy systems becomes a liability that keeps businesses from reaping the benefits of IDP. 

G. Lack of technical expertise

The lack of technical expertise limits the ability to correctly implement, configure, and maintain a solution. This deficit results in poor performance, increased errors, and decreased efficiency, and calls for filling the gap by finding the technical expertise for the solution you need.

Factors to consider while selecting a document automation software

Document automation changes how a business operates. The common business considerations fall into four areas:

1. Functionality

Solutions with limited functionality solve limited issues. In contrast, solutions with robust functionalities resolve a broader range of pain points. Features like data validation that identify discrepancies in a document and mark them for correction. Integrating a human-in-the-loop review feature into the existing workflow automates additional document processing tasks. While deep machine learning algorithms collect and clean up unstructured data analytics.

2. Ease of use

Choosing easy-to-use software delivers successful adoption and a positive user experience. Complications frustrate users, turning them away from adopting a new solution. Intuitive, user-friendly interfaces and straightforward workflows help users quickly access and utilize the system's features, increase productivity, and reduce errors.

3. Integration

For a smooth connection between various systems and software, integration enables them to function together effortlessly. Ensuring seamless integration achieves a streamlined workflow with accurate information and resources accessible from a centralized location.

4. Security

A solution that offers security and robust data protection measures is essential. Security features such as encryption and secured backups maintain clients' trust, protect a business's reputation, and decrease the risk of security breaches and financial losses.

‍Implementing document automation in your business- why you shouldn't wait

The pandemic has taught us two things. One – businesses must adapt and find a flexible way to stay above the competition. And two – technology plays a crucial role in helping companies to thrive. The right approach combines a versatile business strategy, embracing the latest technologies or solutions and thriving in uncertainty.

It's easy to come up with reasons to postpone implementation, such as not having the budget or having a solution that already fits the bill. But it is crucial to retain long-term success in changing times. Businesses must take advantage of AI-powered data extraction to process documents efficiently. It's faster, more cost-effective, and more scalable.

Document automation is easy to set up and deploy. It recognizes and extracts information from multiple formats. Through continuous learning and improvement over time, it is a fitting solution to integrate into the existing infrastructure of a wide array of workflows across businesses of all sizes.

‍The bottom line

As an industry leader, your responsibilities are high, and your time is precious. Moreover, loosely-made goals without structure won't move the needle for your organization at the pace you need to succeed. 

A versatile IDP solution bolsters your workflows and operations as you identify and evaluate your business objectives. Embrace document automation to liberate you and chart a course for success.

Our team of experts is happy to help you determine the best way to do so. Sign-up for a free 14-day trial with Docsumo today.