A paperless accounts payable system is judged, in daily use, on one thing: how quickly somebody can find a document when a supplier is on the phone. Storage is not the hard part and has not been for years. Retrieval is, and it is decided by what the document is attached to rather than by how it is stored. A system where invoices hang off the supplier and the invoice record answers the phone call in seconds; one where they sit in dated folders answers it in minutes and only for the person who filed them. This page is the three things such a system has to do, and the one question to ask about leaving it.
Attach the document to the record, not to a folder
The invoice image belongs to the invoice, which belongs to the supplier. Any structure that requires knowing when something was filed in order to find it is a filing cabinet with extra steps. The structure should make the right filing the easy filing, so nobody has to remember a convention under time pressure.
Make retrieval work for someone who was not there
The real test is a new starter, or an auditor, or you in two years. If finding a document requires knowing the convention, the convention is the system and it will leave when its author does. That is also the moment you discover whether the system is a system or one person's habit with software around it.
Give yourself an export you control
Paperless means committing your records to somebody's system. The question to ask before that is how you get them out: in what format, how completely, and at what cost. A system with no clean export is a system you cannot leave.
Questions people ask about paperless accounts payable system
Does our accounting package count as one?
If it attaches documents to transactions and lets you export them, largely yes. Many small teams need nothing more, and adding a second system creates two places to look.
What about email as the archive?
It is where most invoices arrive and it is a poor archive: no attachment to the record, retrieval by memory, and it leaves with the mailbox. It is an arrival point, not a system.
How does this relate to records management?
Records management adds retention and disposal on top of storage and retrieval. Most small teams need the first two done well and a written retention policy rather than an automated one.