Document digitisation

What it means

Document digitisation means the accounting document is created or converted into electronic form and archived that way. The Accounting Act allows it provided legibility, integrity of content and availability are assured throughout the retention period.

It is not simply scanning. It starts paying off once the data is read off the document automatically, the document goes through approval, and lands in the ledger without being retyped.

A document born electronic - an invoice received by e-mail as a PDF, for instance - is not the same as one converted from paper. The electronic original is not printed only to be scanned again; it is already in final form. When converting from paper, what matters is that the content matches the original and that it is clear who made the conversion and when.

How it works in practice

The practical route has three steps: documents arrive at one address or in cloud storage, the key fields are recognised, and the document follows the agreed workflow. For outgoing invoices the next step is electronic invoicing.

The largest saving is on purchase documents and on eKasa receipts. It also removes the commonest cause of a late close - documents sitting in a car or a wallet.

For a new client we set up a separate e-mail address used only for purchase invoices and send it to the suppliers. Documents arriving there are loaded automatically, OCR picks out the supplier, amounts and dates, and we check only the exceptions the system did not recognise or where the data does not match the order.

What to watch out for

An electronic document must be producible in the form it was received. So the original file is kept alongside the converted one and deleted when the retention period ends, not when the entry is posted.

With paper and electronic flows running side by side, the same document is easily posted twice - once as the PDF from e-mail, once as a scan of the paper copy. A double posting inflates costs and the input VAT deduction, and in an inspection leads to extra tax. A duplicate check on document number and supplier IČO belongs in the process.