by Denny Stamps

On behalf of our entire executive team, thank you for your continued support. At AccuImage, we have a lot to be thankful for this year: our customers who honor us by making us part of their team, our dedicated employees who always give 110%, and our business partners who share our unwavering commitment to excellence, to name a few.

As we enter the holiday season, we want to remind you how important you are to us. We believe that true success can be measured by satisfied customers, quality products and effective solutions. Sharing your comments and concerns with our team helps us achieve these goals.

In this issue of The AccuView, we provide a glimpse into recent "paperless" theories and strategies, particularly those affecting health care and accounts payable professionals. While we don't subscribe to the belief that our world will be one entirely free from paper anytime soon, we are confident that various paperless strategies can reduce paper handling, ensure disaster recovery and provide direct economic benefit to all businesses.

All issues of this newsletter offer generalized common practices, implementation ideas and advice about solutions. But because every business is different, the practices, ideas and advice offered in The AccuView require adaptation and fine-tuning. As part of your needs analysis and discovery team, we can help you determine your specific requirements, so the right solution can be customized and implemented for your unique business.

Please call us at 615.242.7226 to get started today.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Denny Stamps
denny.stamps@accuimagellc.com

In observance of the upcoming holidays, AccuImage's offices will be closed the following days:

• Thursday, November 24
• Friday, November 25
• Friday, December 23
• Monday, December 26
• Monday, January 2

We wish you and your loved ones a joyous holiday season!

Several years of economic uncertainty and the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act have done wonders to raise the profile of accounts payable. As businesses have shifted their emphasis from growth to cost containment and productivity enhancement, accounts payable departments have come under renewed scrutiny for their reliance on costly and inefficient paper-based processes. At the same time, Sarbanes-Oxley has increased senior manager's focus on accounts payable by drawing their attention to the compliance risks inherent to manual, paper-based processes.

People have dreamed of a paperless workplace for decades. In the 1960s, for example, futurists predicted that organizations in the new millennium would exchange information in a fully electronic manner. This sounds quaint from our current vantage point, but who knew that getting rid of paper would be more difficult than putting men on the moon? The unfortunate reality is that corporate processes remain mired in paper, and no one knows that better than accounts payable professionals.

Imaging and Workflow Automation (IWA) solutions streamline the invoice receipt-to-pay cycle by enabling organizations to convert paper invoices into digital images, store them in a web-enabled repository for rapid retrieval, and extract data from them to enhance approval processing. IWA solutions may provide document and data capture, workflow, or both in order to create an end-to-end imaging and workflow solution that integrates with enterprise and line-of-business applications.

The components of IWA can be defined as follows:

• Invoice Receipt. The steps required to receive and prepare invoices for capture, including removing staples, repairing tears, photocopying small items onto 8½ x 11 paper, performing initial data entry, and sorting. Depending on the solution and the source of the invoice, invoice receipt may be manual or automated.

• Document and Data Capture. The process of converting paper invoices and transaction-related documents into digital images and index data. Specific steps include scanning, image enhancement, indexing, validation, and data extraction based on barcodes, Optical Character Recognition (machine print), Optical Mark Recognition (checkboxes), Intelligent Character Recognition (handprint), or manual data entry.

• Content Storage and Management. Refers to the delivery, storage, management, and disposition of electronic documents and data. Depending on the complexity of the solution, this may include Enterprise Content Management (ECM) or Business Process Management (BPM) capabilities for managing the transactional content across its entire lifecycle.

• Workflow Management. The routing of tasks according to predefined business rules and based on individuals' roles and access rights. Workflow provides a tool to track and manage approval processing at the invoice and aggregate level. Common features include automatic notifications to users when specific actions are required, reminder messages, and escalation procedures based on approval hierarchies.

• Posting and Payment. The steps to post approved transactions to the general ledger within an organization's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or accounting system. IWA solutions do not extend to payment, but they do deliver critical transactional data into financial systems for the purpose of generating payments.

• Queries and Analytics. The process of analyzing key invoice receipt-to-pay metrics. Queries and analytics include the generation of standard and ad hoc reports detailing invoices pending approval, unpaid invoices past due, average invoice processing time, and so forth. Supervisors can also monitor individual users' actions for quality control and load balancing.

Accounts payable departments that utilize an IWA solution experience a wide range of benefits, depending on the type of solution they deploy (see table). In general, they benefit in the areas of process efficiency, lower costs, and enhanced visibility and control.

Back-End Document Capture and Archival Alleviates lost and misplaced invoices Allows simultaneous access to invoice information Simplifies discrepancy resolution, transaction research, audits and supplier inquiries Provides secure electronic storage for invoices Reduces storage costs

Front-End Document and Data Capture Removes paper where it enters the organization Reduces manual data entry and full-time staffing requirements Speeds data collection and entry into financial systems Accelerates invoices' entry into approval queues Allows image-enabled approval processing

Front-End Capture and Workflow Streamlines and accelerates approval processing Enhances prompt payment discount capture and reduces incidence of late fees Provides transaction-level visibility into invoice receipt-to-pay activities Tightens overall control over approval processing

IWA solutions are beneficial in all of their forms. However, front-end solutions preserve the benefits of back-end imaging and archival while providing additional advantages in the form of lower costs, higher processing efficiency, and enhanced visibility and control. They can be used to replicate and accelerate existing work patterns or to design entirely new electronic processes. Organizations will continue to use IWA solutions in both a back- and front-end capacity, but the latter will eventually prevail.

For more information about using an IWA solution in your AP department, contact us.

Source: PayStream Advisors, Inc., Corporate Insights Report, Fall 2004

AnyDocINVOICE boosts productivity, increases accuracy, and eliminates the need for manual data entry in your AP operations. You can cut your processing costs in half and turn your incoming invoices around in hours instead of days - all with minimal human intervention.

A complete start-to-finish invoice processing solution, AnyDocINVOICE scans, captures and stores all the images and data from all your incoming invoices. It consists of three products: CAPTUREit for scanning; OCR for AnyDoc for data extraction and collection; and BROKERit for storage and retrieval of invoice data and images.

Invoices are scanned and the images are then sent into OCR for AnyDoc. Utilizing a step-by-step wizard, you determine the information you want to collect from your invoices. OCR for AnyDoc automatically locates and captures the essential data - invoice number, invoice date, total due, detail lines, terms, due date, etc. - without the need for templates. Stacks of invoices are quickly transformed into computer-accessible images and data ready to feed into your existing accounting system and image repository.

The BROKERit component allows you to store and retrieve all your invoices as electronic images from your desktop and eliminate the need for filing cabinets.

For more information about AnyDocINVOICE, contact us.

Your company has a paper trail. With internally produced documents as well as those that are outsourced, you have an ever-growing sheaf of paper, virtual and real, to manage. Do you have a plan? Enterprise document strategies are being adopted with greater frequency by organizations in search of new and better ways to cement their relationships with customers and boost their bottom lines. Can you afford to have a document strategy? Some would argue that in today's business climate, you can't afford not to have one, and the smart money's on developing a document investment strategy.

There are two issues at play here: developing a document investment strategy and developing a document strategy. If you're doing one, you should be doing the other. They're really two sides of the same coin. Of course, you know all too well that the old adage is true: you have to spend money to make money. And investing in an enterprise document strategy will require resources of both money and time.

Until now, you may have never considered a document strategy, let alone considered it a core business function. Consider this: statements and invoices may be your organization's only guaranteed touch-point with customers, providing not only opportunities to foster customer loyalty, but more importantly, opportunities to grow revenue.

You can't afford to miss out on these opportunities.

As if those weren't reasons enough to adopt such a strategy, there are a host of other benefits, economically speaking, including streamlined operations, the ability to quickly adapt to changing production needs, and the cost savings that can be realized through fewer calls due to customer confusion.

Source: docume.nt, Kemal Carr, October 2005

Hurricane Katrina has been the loudest wakeup call so far for the need for electronic health records (EHRs), according to some prominent policy figures. Floods from the storm erased the medical records of many people in the central Gulf Coast because they were written on paper and stored in boxes in hospitals and physicians' offices.

Dr. David Brailer, national coordinator for health information technology at the Department of Health and Human Services, said EHRs will now be a part of all crisis response plans. "There was never a health IT component of the disaster recovery plan … but there will be," he said recently. Brailer said the revelation that electronic medical records save lives is "something so obvious it hits you between the eyes."

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich emphasized that message. "Paper kills," he said. "Paper records are an utterly irrational national security risk." Gingrich is the founder of the Center for Health Transformation, a public/private partnership trying to push technological reforms in the health care system. "I hope we will never have a more vivid, more explicit case study in the need" to have EHRs, he said, adding that the absence of electronic medical files is a financial and moral failure.

"I believe that, with the lesson of Katrina, there is zero excuse for not doing something," Gingrich said. Considering the likelihood of terrorism, another hurricane or a pandemic illness such as avian flu, "we are risking a lot of American lives if we don't do something."

Source: Federal Computer Week, Aliya Sternstein, September 26, 2005

AccuImage, LLC is a systems integrator that empowers their customers with solutions designed to gain the maximum value from their information at every point in the information lifecycle. Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, AccuImage specializes in the design, installation and support of document and content management systems, forms processing solutions, and electronic workflow systems. The company offers hardware and software from leading companies - AnyDoc Software, Böwe Bell+Howell, Canon, Captaris, Captovation, EMC Documentum, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Kodak, Kofax, Panasonic, Plasmon and Verity - as well as consulting, document conversion and professional services.