Why Small Businesses do not use Automatic Account Data Capture Software?

Small businesses houses normally do not use any software to convert their account data from paper documents. To the most, these companies use software just to scan their paper based accounting documents and manually enter the accounting data into their accounting or ERP system. This is not a cost-effective solution; time spent on data entry, verification, and data calculation can be automated using account data capture software. This will also help you to keep away unwanted and vital mistakes apart from making the process fast. Reasons for not using Account Data capture software: Cost of the account data capture software is the main reason for which small businesses houses do not embrace it in their accounting departments. The total cost of owning a sophisticated accounting capture may range from few hundred thousand to a million dollars. The cost includes but not limited to following: 1. Licensing Fee for the software (User based or CPU based access) 2. Hardware upgrade to install the software 3. Training for your employees 4. Software support and maintenance Any business that uses the automatic account capture software must incur mentioned expenses. Sometimes accounting data capture software may not come with a standard interface to your accounting software or ERP system; in this case, you may have to go back to the vendor for custom development of the interface. The customized interface helps the account capture software to feed the captured data into your accounting or ERP system. As you know invoices, bills, and checks come in different colors, shapes, and sizes. Important account data like customer name, date, and amount may be in different places within the paper documents. There might also be handwritten notes on the paper documents. Because of these reasons, the accounting software may not accurately capture all the account data from the paper documents. If the software fails to identify scanned images then it needs to be processed manually. Though the account data capture software vendors embraced OCR and ICR technologies into their product to capture the account data accurately from the scanned images, they are still long way to go to remove the manual process. So any time if the account data capture software could not recognize the data from the scanned image it has to be processed manually by the accounting executives. For big companies using an account data capture solution is affordable and they can justify the managing cost. However, for small companies it is not an affordable solution and their in-house manual process is not cost-effective and efficient. What is the solution for small businesses to improve their accounts payable and accounts receivable operations? The simplest answer and solution is to use an offshore outsource vendor to process all their accounts payable and accounts receivable data. They can use their existing infrastructure to send the data to offshore location securely through Internet to be processed by the offshore vendor. For more details on how the process works read Cybelink Secure BPO.