No more invoice chaos! fileee shows you how you can easily digitize your company's invoices. Forget the hassle of searching through piles of paper - together we'll bring digital order to the invoice chaos. We'll show you how digital invoice documentation works - so that you can keep track of everything in the future.
Paper-based processes are time-consuming, error-prone and costly. In contrast, there are many advantages to digitizing invoices: Processing digital invoices entails a lower error rate, as invoice data can be extracted thanks to the OCR technology in smart document management software (DMS). Processing times are significantly shorter and invoices can be archived in a cloud solution. This increases the efficiency of the entire finance department.
Once you have decided on fileee, it is important to think about how exactly you want to use your DMS. Think about who will be working with fileee in the future, how many team members you want to add and which roles they should take on. In order to be able to manage documents in your company with fileee Teams together with your colleagues in a structured and simple way, you should clarify which individual user rights you want to distribute to whom. In addition, it can't hurt to invest some time in setting up a structure with tags and spaces so that all documents are easy to find. Because in fileee there is no digital version of the annoying folder structures - so you no longer have to remember where a document has been filed. With tags, full-text search and Spaces, you can find any document in no time at all. We also recommend that you create connections from fileee to various services such as lexoffice or DATEV and your Dropbox. If you invest enough time at the beginning to set up a good structure, it will definitely pay off in the long term.
The next step is to convert your existing paper invoices into digital files, which you can do using an office scanner or a smartphone. After scanning, your document is analyzed using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and artificial intelligence. This automatically extracts all important information. This means that invoice data such as invoice number, date, amount, etc. are recognized and saved in digital form. This saves you a lot of time and effort when entering the data. In the medium term, OCR recognition can replace the dual control principle - as is the case with our customer APF Consult, for example.
With a central email inbox that you connect to fileee, you can easily import all incoming invoices bundled together into your document management system. It is best to choose an unambiguous address such as Rechnungen@Firma.de. Your digital files are now imported into fileee and can then be managed, shared, tagged or exported to accounting software such as DATEV.
If you do not want to set up a central mailbox, you can create a forwarding rule in your email inbox that automatically forwards all emails with "invoice" in the title to your individual fileee email address, for example. Attachments are then automatically imported into fileee.
Now that your invoices have been digitized and the data extracted, it's time to organize them. In fileee, you can create structures to sort your invoices. For example, you can share a space with your tax advisor in which you share all tax-relevant documents. Use tags with keywords to make it easier to search for specific invoices. Not all documents need tags or need to be shared in Spaces - with our full-text search, you can easily find documents again by searching for a specific word used in the invoice, for example. Of course, you can also filter your documents and only display documents of the type "invoice" from a specific sender.
It may be a little unfamiliar at first to leave the familiar folder structure and no longer click from folder to folder in depth - but you will quickly realize how much faster it is to manage documents when you can simply search and filter flexibly. By the way, it's even faster with fileee Pay. This allows you to easily pay your invoices from within fileee. You can find out exactly what you need to do in the fileee Pay help center.
After you have successfully digitized all your invoices, you should take care of storing your physical originals. This is where the fileeeBox comes into play. With it, you can store your original invoices quickly and without the hassle of filing them away and always have your documents to hand. For your daily work with your documents, you have them digitally available in fileee. Should you ever need the original, fileee shows you exactly where the original is located in your fileeeBox.
You can find out more about our fileeeBox here.
Once you have started the process of invoice digitization, it is important to inform your suppliers that you are digitizing your incoming invoices and that you prefer digital invoices from now on. Make sure you give them clear instructions on how to send their invoices electronically, whether by email or via a dedicated portal. Open communication with your suppliers will enable a smooth transition to digital invoice processing and ensure efficient collaboration.
If you decide to digitize invoices, you must always consider the legal framework. When using a digital document management system such as fileee, it is essential that all invoices contain the required information, such as the date of issue, the full name and address of the company providing the service and the recipient, as well as a consecutive invoice number. They must also be legible and ensure that they are stored in accordance with data security guidelines and can be retrieved at any time. Here is an overview of which aspects documents must fulfill according to GoBD (the principles for the proper management and storage of books, records and documents in electronic form and for data access) in order to be considered to be archived in an audit-proof manner:
With fileee, audit-proof archiving is easy to ensure. You can find out what you need to pay attention to in our article on audit-proof filing.
fileee is your all-round solution that helps you digitize, manage and archive documents. If you have decided to digitize your incoming invoices and other documents with fileee, you can look forward to many other features that we have to offer and with which your invoice processing can be handled digitally very easily and flexibly .
