Finance and Accounting Teams are often buried in documents, whether on paper or stored electronically. Invoices, receipts, tax filings, financial statements, and various other documents move in and out of the finance and accounting department at a rate that would seem unimaginable to most other teams within an organization.
Moving to a paperless office or streamlining the processing of digital documents and metadata can be costly and complex endeavors, but they are increasingly important in today's fast-paced and technology-driven business environment. The benefits of such initiatives include improved efficiency, reduced risk of errors, enhanced security and compliance, and a smaller environmental footprint.
Dealing with this constant flow comes with serious challenges, but these are challenges that FormKiQ is built to solve:
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Document Organization:
Creating and maintaining the categorization and discovery metadata required to organize documents, whether for recall or for more sophisticated automation around processes and workflows, requires a significant investment. Searching and accessing those documents once they have been properly tagged and categorized is also challenging, especially when dealing with files stored in different formats or in different locations.
FormKiQ allows for both automated and manual classification and organization of documents, leveraging both artificial intelligence and intelligent document processing for automation, and providing a RESTful API and intuitive web console for manual metadata creation as well. This metadata is then available for FormKiQ's full-text and tag-based search functionality, allowing efficient recall of documents based on a combination of content and metadata.
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Data Accuracy:
Not only does any manual processes run a risk of errors being introduced to the documents and metadata, the risk of inaccuracy can have significant financial and even legal ramifications.
FormKiQ's workflows and actions allow more consistent automation of processes, including optical character recognition and intelligent document processing; this automation can be used not only to process documents and create metadata effectively, but also to detect issues in the documents themselves, such as using natural language processing to overcome spelling and grammatical errors.
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Regulatory and Certification-related Compliance:
Finance and accounting documents must be compliant with various regulations depending on their jurisdiction. These regulations include GDPR (EU), HIPAA (USA), and PIPEDA (Canada). In addition, many organizations pursue certifications such as SOC and ISO. Meeting all compliance requirements can be time-consuming and require specific knowledge and expertise; in addition to being compliant, processes are needed to be able to demonstrate compliance during audits and reviews.
FormKiQ enables compliance through the use of Amazon Web Services and its best-in-class tools, ensuring that regulations can be met by meeting the expectations set by certifications and controls such as FedRamp and NIST 800-53.
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Collaboration, Communication, and Version Control:
Finance and accounting teams often need to collaborate with other departments, such as HR and legal, to access and share documents. This can be challenging when documents are stored in multiple locations and require manual processes to access and share. As well, managing different versions of documents and avoiding confusion or loss of critical information requires efficient version control systems.
FormKiQ provides integration betweens systems and disparate file storage solutions, enabling FormKiQ to maintain storage and management of the Document of Record, or provide connectivity with an alternative primary document repository. FormKiQ also enables access to Office365, Google Drive, and other productivity and online storage tools.
For version control, FormKiQ includes version history powered by Amazon S3 Versions, and also enables document control procedures, such as requiring a document controller, providing legal hold functionality, and allowing for document expiry.
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Document Security
Finance and accounting documents contain sensitive information that must be kept secure. Ensuring that documents are only accessible by authorized personnel and are protected from theft, loss, or damage can be a significant challenge.
FormKiQ not only provides encryption in-transit and at-rest, it also enables granular access controls through user management, multi-site partitions, and both role- and attribute-based access control options.
FormKiQ not only provides modules for moving to a paperless finance and accounting team, it also provides security by design and is able to integrate with other systems as needed.
Contact us to discuss how FormKiQ can ensure that your financial and accounting challenges are being solved in a way that is both reliable and cost effective.