The key benefits for accounting, tax and financial professionals to be gained from deploying a DMS:
1. Electronic workpapers - This benefit covers a lot of territory, so let's break it down a little further. For those of you who do a perform a lot of trial balance based engagements such as audits, reviews, compilations and entity tax returns, there is an entire category of software referred to as "electronic work papers". This category is attended to by products such as Pro System fx Engagement (CCH), CaseWare and Engagement CS (Thomson Reuters.) While these applications have some attributes typically associated with DMS, they are primarily designed to work in tandem with them to create an environment where all of your workpapers are digital. Our focus in this review is DMS; we will address the electronic workpaper solutions in a future edition of the Progressive Accountant.
The main point here is that one of the key benefits of a DMS is to facilitate a model whereby all of your workpapers, particularly those that are not directly part of a trial balance based engagement, are managed and maintained in digital format. This provides you with better capabilities to organize workpapers, create electronic links between them and perhaps most importantly, let multiple people have access to the same set of workpapers simultaneously.
2. Digital workflows - When you transform your workflows to a paperless model you create many new opportunities to automate and streamline your procedures. In this day and age anything you can do to increase staff productivity is going to pay big dividends. Examples of some of the opportunities include routing workpaper files automatically based upon established "rules", organizing workpaper information automatically based on its origin, tracking critical engagement data in a single, integrated electronic binder.
3. Anytime, anywhere access - Once you have all of your documents in electronic format and you provide remote access to your information system, you have established a valuable competitive advantage that will impact both your client and staff relationships. Your staff will have the ability to get their work done from anywhere they can get on-line. That translates into flexibility for them and increased productivity for the firm. This will have a direct and positive impact on your recruitment and retention initiatives. For your clients it means the opportunity to empower them with a self-service portal to access their important tax and financial information at the time and place of their choosing.
4. Information security - The importance of effectively securing the confidentiality of sensitive client tax and financial information is growing at an accelerated pace. A strong DMS solution is a core ingredient to any serious information security strategy. You will have the ability to control who can access what information and provide an audit trail of document access.
5. Hands-free data exchange - A key benefit of digital information is that you then have the potential to capture information off those documents automatically and transfer the data to other applications, "hands free." This means significant increases in productivity and reduced errors by eliminating manual and redundant data entry procedures. An example is a program like ProSystem fx Scan from CCH. This software will automatically recognize key types of 1040 tax supporting documents such as w-2's, 1099's, etc. and organize the information properly in a PDF file and then ultimately pass key data directly to the ProFx 1040 tax software.