Best practices: Stop sending financial documents as email attachments

Understand the business benefits of why you should stop sending documents as PDF attachments to emails, and what alternative solutions are available for you.

Think of the types of financial documents your business sends. These could be invoices, statements or customer payment notifications. How do you currently distribute these documents? More and more businesses are addressing better ways to distribute their documents. Moving away from the likes of print and post and PDFs attached to emails, to a more efficient solution – a digital solution.

But are businesses aware of what a full digital solution means? Attaching PDFs to emails isn’t the answer. Distributing the likes of financial documents by email, doesn’t bring you all the benefits of a full digital solution. A full digital solution that businesses are exploring using multichannel portals and technologies.

But what is the difference between sending a financial document via email or via a portal? Read on and discover the differences and learn the business benefits.

What are the key differences?

In line with digital transformation, businesses are starting to address their processes. Processes that no longer require large quantities of paper communications and print and post. Businesses are starting to digitalise their processes and communicators instead.

When you reduce the need for paper, envelopes and franking machines, the cost savings are clear. So are the environmental benefits. But what are the other benefits from a digital solution?

Replacing print and post with emails and attachments, may seem like you are simplifying processes. With less paper to handle and less human intervention, you might think you’re improving your business efficiency. But not all the efficiencies that come with a digital, multichannel solution.

Utilising multichannel solutions allows your business to benefit even more. From having more visibility and more control over what your business is sending. Multichannel solutions exist to digitalise the whole experience and streamline your business processes.

What are the business opportunities?

Monitoring and reporting

Unless you set-up Read Confirmation on your emails, you don’t have full visibility. Your business cannot see who opens your emails, who opens your documents and who reads them.

With a multichannel communication portal solution your business will have full visibility. Have the ability to view document sends, open rates and views via a personalised dashboard accessible by your whole business. No longer spend time chasing if customers have received documents. Your portal will detail this for you.

Scalability

Distributing your business financial documents by emails with attachments can be time consuming. With a portal solution, cut down this time:

Send your data alongside your document template.
Your portal applies your data to your template (a bit like a mailmerge).
Your users are notified to access their document via your secure portal.

With a portal solution you will also be avoiding the potential risk of the blocking of bulk emails by ISPs due to spam filters.

Security

You cannot be sure of the secure nature of your document, when sending it by email and attachments. Even though the chances may be small, emails and their attachments can be intercepted. Therefore no longer making your communications and documents secure.

With a portal solution, you upload your documents via a secure HTTPs connection. Knowing that only your business and logged in users can access their documents and data. However, it is vital to pick a portal provider with data security and business continuity accreditations in place.

Less risk of human error

There is a chance of human error, when manually inputting email addresses and attaching files. Via a secure portal, send your business’ data and documents securely to your provider. Your provider then audits your data for any anomalies, and distributes your documents via your portal.

simple and smart admin and finance processes

Audit Trail

Your portal stores and archives your documents and data for up to seven years. The same cannot be said for emails and their attachments.

Plus, having a full set of order, POD and invoice documents in one place reduces invoice queries and speeds up your business’ invoice to cash time.

What are the business benefits?

Apart from extra security, less manual work and tracking ability, a portal solution can also get you your payments quicker.

Due to tracking and reporting capabilities, you know when your business financial documents have been received. As invoice payment periods start from an invoice’s registration, a portal solution can then shorten the payment period by a couple of days.

Plus enjoy extra portal invoicing features. Automatically send reminders for overdue invoices. And use integrated payment functionality so that your invoice is opened, view and paid in one journey.

Discuss multichannel portal solutions for your business today

At Unifiedpost Group, we understand the business benefits of replacing PDFs and emails, with a secure multichannel communication portal solution. Our multichannel communication portal helps businesses streamline their processes and engage with their customers and suppliers easier than before. Learn more about the opportunities and business benefits our portal solution can bring to your business today.

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