In 2006 when I was working on my previous startup we had a geographically dispersed team located in the US, Canada and India.  Team members would send their receipts to our main office where the bookkeeping took place.  Our bookkeeper was located 20 miles away and she had to visit our office twice a month to do our bookkeeping.  There were several problems, and the idea for what was to be DocSnaps took shape…

Collecting Financial Documents – Documents came in all shapes and sizes (long faded print-outs, short faded receipts), different locations (at the gas station, restaurant, or via mail), and in different formats (email receipts for items paid for online, bank statements as CSV or QIF files).  Just collecting all this information in a folder to present to the bookkeeper was a problem, let alone managing the finances.

The Bookkeeping Process – The bookkeeper spent a total of 4 hours every month travelling to our location to do about 1-days worth of work.  Admittedly she was a joy to work with but it was probably frustrating for her not to get answers to some of her questions right away becuase someone was not at the office or was always late in providing answers she had painstakingly jotted down on a piece of paper.   We decided to scan all the documents and email it to her to make her life easier.  But then the trouble was being able to corelate the transactions she entered into Quickbooks to the scanned documents she received weekly.  Despite the fact that the documents were neatly organized into folders, and we had full access to a remote desktop hosting the accounting software there was confusion.

Communication Problem - Emails flew back and forth.  We even maintained a sort of communication log as a text file in each of the document folders.  But when it came time for the accountant to take a look at our books at year-end, he was confused and confounded by the document and communication trail.  Overall we had spent a lot of time (and money) for something that was more trouble to maintain than the status quo.

Easy Auditing – Our earliest DocSnaps product consisted of a simple GL with each transaction connected to a source document.  Basically attached to each expense item was a scanned image of the expense in pdf format.  We also solved the communication problem with the ability to enter comments for each expense item or document which made collaborating with our bookkeeper a lot easier.  But the happiest person in all this was the accountant.  His tech-savvy staff could login to our account with the password we provided them, look at the balance sheet, drill down to the transactions and if they had any doubts or questions about a particular item, just click on it and view the source document, right there on their computer screen!  To our development team this was nothing extra ordinary, but to the accountants that we showed it to, it was a joy to behold.

Bookkeeping Automation - Over time the product was improved incrementally.  What we have now is a well tested, secure, and user friendly application a far cry from the first application that was presented to our bookkeeper.  What makes the bookkeeper really happy now is the innovative expert system we have that automatically creates a transacton for each scanned documents.  She used to spend 80% of her time doing data entry from documents.  But the time she got to the point where she had to ask us some questions and provide us some insight into our business it was time to leave.  Now this tedious part is taken over by our software which is able to perform this task more accurately than a human being.  What it does not understand it flags for our bookkeeper to enter.

So overall these are the 5 big reasons why DocSnaps was created – to make the bookkeeper, accountant, and our team happy.  There are a lot more things DocSnaps can do which will be the subject of future blogs.