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The Société Fiduciaire de Paris, founded in 2003, provides complete finance and accounting services that include all the classical duties of bookkeeping. The company assumes responsibility for all accounting, payments and related activities and clients range from private individuals to enterprises of medium size. They also offer a multidisciplinary consulting service.

Company founder François Pimbert is familiar with computer technology and is an information systems expert. He supports client's systems and uses tools that enable him to optimise their IT productivity. As an example, he cites one of the routine tasks of an office bookkeeper, the acquisition of bank reports - a process that can be much simplified by a computer solution.

"Capturing bank reports is a tedious task that has to be done regularly. Even though we have solutions to avoid manual operations, we often face situations where the data cannot be retrieved: the client calls urgently for our help. He may have reports on paper acquired for an audit, or daily reports, but there will always be problems to consider when bank reports must be input."

A COMPLETE PROJECT APPROACH
Obtaining the required tools was straightforward. After considerable market research, François Pimbert chose the Plustek PS286 scanner: "The other OCR solutions I tested turned out to be unsatisfactory: most were inflexible, took too long to digitise the data and the resulting quality was not good enough."

The quality of digitisation, although a fundamental element, was not the only reason for the decision: "To be optimised, the integration of a digitising process for the information system of an individual enterprise must be done as a complete project," explains Pimbert. "In particular it is essential that the digitised data be in a format suitable for the bookkeeping software of the enterprise."

BY THE BOOKS
The beginning of every year is a period of higher charges in the accountancy business with the closing of profit-and-loss accounts. The Plustek scanner is therefore in use intensively at this time - and this is where it proves its worth. A unique command button, with 9 programmable functions, makes it possible to set output and scanning parameters. François Pimbert selects Excel format for data output to match the bookkeeping software; "The software and hardware processes perform well. It is simple, easy to use and fast."

The scanner was first used for a client's bookkeeping records. "The results were remarkable," explained François Pimbert. "The PS286 was able to scan 61 pages of bank reports in two passes. We digitised the activity of a complete year - 3000 lines of transactions - in fifteen minutes. It is also very practical because both sides of a document can be scanned."

RELIABLE DATA, STRUCTURED FORMAT
The reliability of the digitised data is good: 95% was correctly captured and output. Only 5% of the data had to be corrected afterwards. François Pimbert comments:

"The scanner always structures the data in the same way, which is not the case with manual capture. This results in better and more regular data."

After the data has been scanned it must of course be validated. "The manual phase, the editing, after capture is essential: it allows us to attain a quality that is 100% reliable," says Pimbert. "This work is done in Excel before the data is passed to our bookkeeping application." All in all, the capturing of the PME records took approximately two days. François Pimbert estimates that the Société Fiduciaire de Paris saved approximately 75% of the time it would have taken with a manual capture process.

POSITIVE POINTS
Besides the obvious time saving in the capture of the raw data, there will be more time available for devoting to information processing down the line. François Pimbert also said: "Compared to manual capture, the task is more interesting for young people who are qualified for the assigned work. This internally developed solution eliminates the need for farming out, which contributes to cost management. In addition the technical characteristics of the scanner allow its use for the digitising of many other kinds of documents: we use it to digitise statutes, where it has also proven to be highly effective."
More info: www.plustek.com/uk