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Blenheim Palace brings in electronic document management
Seeks efficient invoice processing with Sage system
By Antony Savvas | Computerworld UK | Published 00:20, 13 February 11
World Heritage Site Blenheim Palace is adopting electronic document management to more efficiently process 20,000 financial documents a year.
It is implementing Version One’s document management and imaging systems to electronically manage its financial documents instead of using time-consuming manual processes.
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The technology will be seamlessly integrated into Blenheim Palace’s Sage Line 500 accounting system and is expected to go live later this month.
Blenheim's current system is paper-based, requiring the manual storage and processing of purchase and sales invoices. Documents distributed internally are often mislaid making it difficult for the finance team to establish where invoices were in the approval cycle.
Manually filing and retrieving paper documents was time-consuming, the palace said, and physical storage space was being stretched to capacity.
Once Version One’s systems are live, the 20,000 purchase invoices Blenheim Palace receives each year will be scanned, tagged to the appropriate record in the Sage accounting system and electronically stored. They can then be retrieved by authorised users directly from Sage.
Frank Warn, head of finance at Blenheim Palace, said: “Moving from paper-based processes to automated systems will considerably streamline our accounts payable (AP) processes and provide us with greater control.
"For the first time the finance department will gain instant visibility over which invoices have been authorised for payment. This will help to speed-up invoice approval times and ensure we are able to work much more efficiently.”
Earlier this year, Bank of China in London announced it was working with IBM to reduce its paper consumption by 95 percent, while aiming to improve the efficiency of conducting financial transactions, through new electronic document management systems.
Bank of China turned to IBM and IBM business partner Centric iSolutions to help its London branch automate the processing of interbank transaction messages it receives on a daily basis.
With new electronic systems in place Bank of China employees in London now have access to messages through an online search capability, allowing them to monitor transactions as they are sent and received by the bank.
Photo: Gailf548
