Scanning and Organizing 2019 Tax Forms and Documents
Well, we’re creeping up on the end of tax season, folks. Some people loathe it, and some find it therapeutic. Either way, we all have to deal with it. And for lots of businesses, it can be an absolute beast of a time-eater.
This is because so many organizations have to wade through tax paperwork and search for documents. But did you know that it doesn’t have to be this way?
Banish the Boxes
Eureka! Companies can simplify this whole debacle by digitizing tax documents. This saves loads upon loads of time, energy, and space. Say goodbye to the frightening amount of filing cabinets, boxes, and over-stuffed desks.
As far back as 1997, the IRS gave the green light to businesses to digitally convert their tax documents, including investments, payments, and income information, along with any other tax records. As long as everyone follows best evidence standards, companies are free to digitize away—freeing up massive amounts of space in their offices and productivity in their employees.
What are These “Evidence Standards”?
In order for receipts to be legit in the eyes of the IRS, they must be absolutely identical to the originals, and they must contain all of the information included in the originals.
Each receipt should include the company’s name and address, the transaction date, and the amount paid. It’s also a good idea to include the purpose of the purchase to the business, for audit purposes.
The IRS also requires accurate and consistent data backup. Businesses should keep content backed up both online and on a secure external hard drive or server. Having multiple backups is of major importance in case a hard drive is corrupted or damaged.
This one’s a no-brainer, but it’s worth noting: when digitizing, make 100% sure your scans are clear and readable as possible.
One Company’s True Story of Digitizing
As with digitizing any company content, scanning in tax documents just plainly and simply makes working life easier. It streamlines the notoriously tortuous and tedious tax process by creating an easy process to store, preserve, index, retrieve, share, and reproduce company records.
Just ask the good people at Williams, Pitts & Beard of Hernando, Mississippi.
This certified public accounting firm—which services more than 1,000 individual clients and more than 250 commercial clients annually — used to have a serious space problem due to having an immense amount of paperwork.
“We simply ran out of space and had no more room to put anything,” says Danny Williams, managing partner at Williams, Pitts & Beard. “While we have to maintain documents for our daily reference and access, the problem was made greater by the fact that legally we have to retain documents and files for up to seven years.”
When Williams, Pitts & Beard called Contentverse to save the day, they experienced a truly company-changing situation.
Searching for a solution that was functional, easy to use, and simple to implement, they decided to go with Computhink’s Contentverse application, which helped them to transition their employees to a full document management software environment within a week.
Since this happened, Williams, Pitts & Beard has transferred more than 1,000,000 paper documents into the Contentverse system, and electronically manages more than 98% of its previously paper files. They have much more space in their office (so much, in fact, that they were able to fit in more employees), and they have slashed down costs that were going towards paper and ink, copier, and fax systems.
Most impressive of all, their staff have benefited from an unexpected improvement in productivity. Before Contentverse, their accounting process had taken up to 30 steps—from originating a document to handing off to someone else, all the way through filing and retrieving documents. Obviously, this took a significant amount of time and involved many people in different departments.
Through Contentverse, the important content that the employees at Williams, Pitts & Beard need is automatically archived directly to Contentverse. Their workers can now easily share documents to other users, and any member with appropriate security credentials can access the same files.
“We could have never imagined the type of results that we have attained from this solution,” says Rebecca Beard. “Contentverse has eliminated at least 80% of the time needed in our processes, giving our employees more time to spend cultivating relationships with our clients.”
Sounds wonderful, yes?
In Conclusion…
Don’t have a Tax Time Sad Face. It’s time for a more efficient approach to your tax returns. Say so long to all that paper—crowded drawers, walls filled with filing cabinets, lost content, and overwhelming stacks of paper. Transferring your company’s tax documents to an electronic format will revolutionize the way you do taxes forever and will breathe new life into your employees.
Where to Go From Here
Want the smooth transition from having too much paperwork to having company data at your fingertips? Do what Williams, Pitts & Beard did—call Computhink to the rescue.
Computhink is a company of life-savers exclusively focused on delivering easy-to-implement and easy-to-use enterprise document and content management software solutions. Our flagship enterprise content management system, Contentverse, features a built-in workflow to make compiling tax documents and filing them a heck of a lot easier! Notifications for tasks and approval speed up the process, so you never have to worry about filing on time.
We’re happy to offer many outstanding tools from Contentverse, such as flexible version revision software to keep files in line and employees on task. Our version revision allows an owner (or administrator) of a document to make previous versions of that document available for viewing by other users. The administrator is still in control of the document, but the content can be made available to a specific selection of others in the system.
Another feature provided by Contentverse is document retention, which allows an administrator to set a certain amount of time before a deleted file is actually purged. A good document retention system like ours helps support an organization’s overall effort to manage its intellectual property while also serving as an aid to control information storage costs and to facilitate the location and retrieval of documents for legal discovery that aids in compliance.
Contentverse also has exceptional file scanning capabilities which will completely revitalize your employees’ workflow and morale, and make your business run leaps and bounds faster and more efficiently. Digitizing tax documents is easier than ever!
If you’re looking for content management solutions for this tax season, or in general for your business, we’re your experts. Let Contentverse help you today!
A version of this article was published as Digitizing Your Tax Documents for Your Company in 2016 by Daniel Cochran on 2/25/16.