Cambridge Assessment, Europe’s largest non-profit exam assessment agency, expects to cut manual data entry by up to 75 per cent by introducing an electronic accounts system that will process more than 250,000 documents a year.

The agency, a department of the University of Cambridge, will drop its current accounts payable function and take on Version One’s document management, imaging and authorisation systems.

The current system requires clerks to manually duplicate invoices, purchase orders and expense claim forms, stamp and address the documents and place them in the internal post.

And because the organisation only has enough space at head office to hold three months of invoices on-site, older invoices are stored in a warehouse ten miles away and retrieving these can take up to two days.

The new system, which will be integrated into the existing CODA Financials accounting system, is expected to go live at the end of 2008.

When the new system comes into place, invoices will be scanned centrally, marked to the correct record in the CODA system, and electronically stored. Purchase invoices will be electronically authorised, and data from them will be captured and verified using optical character recognition technology.

Martin Smiley, group financial director from Cambridge Assessment, said: "Time-consuming manual-based processes have been impacting our ability to efficiently process supplier invoices.

"We can have up to 14 staff manually filing and retrieving documents at any one time because we handle so much paper. Losing claim forms is also all too common.

"Version One’s software will free-up document storage space, cut expensive archiving costs and make it impossible to lose documents. We will also no longer need to employ temporary staff to undertake filing and basic administrative tasks, further cutting costs."

Smiley added: "Being able to track exactly where invoices are in the approval chain, will streamline the approval process, allowing us to improve communications with our suppliers and cutting late payment penalties."

UK charity Action for Children is also a customer of Version One’s document managing systems.

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Exams agency boosts efficiency with document management system

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