How to digitise your company's accounting documents

The ideal end product of comprehensive corporate digitalization is a paperless document workflow. However, there are various paths to achieving this, and the workflow itself can vary—ranging from simply transferring paper documents to a computer by essentially photographing them, to creating machine-readable and analyzable documents.

It is important to keep in mind that there is no right or wrong way to digitalize. The approach is determined by company management. Decisions can be influenced by many different factors, including available human resources, projected costs, and the intended use of the digitalized documents. It is entirely possible that for a small business, scanned contracts and electronically prepared invoices are sufficient, as storing them in cloud storage is more convenient and secure than keeping them in folders in a corner of the office or at the owner's home. Conversely, another company may have an urgent need to search for information within a rapidly growing volume of documents, requiring a completely different approach.

Understandable to humans and machines

It should be noted that digitalization is not just the conversion of paper documents into electronic ones; it is a process in which a company commits to transitioning to so-called "paperless accounting." This means that the company will henceforth avoid issuing any documents in paper format. At the same time, it must be remembered that the company must comply with the requirements of the Accounting Law, which states that if accounting is maintained electronically using accounting software or an accounting information system, accounting documents must be displayed on a computer or other electronic device screen in a human-readable format, and the ability to create paper-based derivatives—or printouts—of these documents must be ensured. A human-readable format is an electronic method of displaying data that a natural person can use as information without any additional processing. Therefore, it must be readable and understandable, just as it was in the paper era.

There are various ways to achieve this result: by scanning, photographing, or using specialized software. In accounting, digitalization has several stages: first, converting the paper document into an electronic one; second, processing the electronic document.

If paper documents are converted to electronic format in different ways, such as by photographing or scanning, an agreement on the electronic document format must be reached. This could be PDF or an image format such as JPG or PNG. Other formats may be used, provided it is first determined how the document will be processed in accounting and whether the necessary annotations can be made on it. It may be necessary to purchase specialized software to perform the required tasks.

From image to processable document

If data from a document needs to be entered into an accounting system, it is important to understand how this will happen well in advance. Not all programs can read data from a PDF format, let alone copy it automatically. Therefore, a seemingly insignificant issue can lead to a situation where someone ends up having to retype all the data by hand, and the good idea of digitalization is lost. Or worse—an employee prints these documents on paper just to enter them into the computer.

It may be more sensible to create documents in a machine-readable format from the outset, which will significantly facilitate accounting work. Consequently, it is possible to receive supporting documents in a structured format such as XML. For this purpose, online data exchange channels can be used, including the e-address, which allows for receiving documents from a partner that are immediately imported from the online data portal into the accounting system, where they will also be stored in electronic format. If data is received via online channels, it is possible for the document data to be imported into the program, with the additional option of obtaining the document in a human-readable format, such as PDF. In this situation, there are also two options: save the PDF on your own data server or store it in the online channel.

The most important fact, however, is that such documents are easily processable, instantly shareable, and reduce the amount of manual labor required. This is the primary goal of digitalization.