Going paperless

We have a small office, and since moving is not an option, we've decided to go paperless. We're hoping that Sage will have some support in this endeavour, because so many of our suppliers are sending us THEIR invoices as PDFs. SO, what we want to know is, is it possible to attach a PDF to an AR or AP item in Sage? It'd be great to be able to scan the original paper to PDF (or simply attach an existing PDF) to the expense entry so we have the original from the supplier when we pull up the item.

If this IS NOT something we can do in Sage, perhaps it's a feature the developers should be working on, because come hell or high water, we're paperless this year. 

  • 0

    That would be a great feature and I would love to see that too! It is offered in quickBook.

    But do realize that you can't shred the paper or delete the email containing the pdf after you have scanned/saved file as per CRA. Check out their regulations regarding electronic data and documents. Even the email you received containing the pdf invoice must be kept for 7 years after tax filing as the email is considered the original document.

    Until CRA changes their requirements or the acceptable method of imaging papers per CRA becomes less expensive then we are stuck with some papers.

  • 0

    I don't think it's likely the developers are working on it.  At this last fall's Alan Salmon tour they were talking up the coming mobile integration that's going to be the cool thing for 2015.  

    Even if you can't integrate your source documents, and all you can do for now is save all your PDFs in folders on a secure server share, and pack all the paper off to storage, it's worth doing.  

    My understanding of CRA's policy was that they were fine with electronic-only storage of documents, but your responsibility for making sure everything is retrievable still remains.

  • 0 in reply to RandyW

    Electronic storage has to be to their specifications. Scanning a documents does not ensure that the document cannot be changed hence why our everyday method of scanning will not comply with CRA's electronic storage only - which also needs to be accompanied by a letter from CRA that you are allow to destroy the document that you imaged as per CRA specs.

  • 0 in reply to Smith and Co

    This is all immaterial to what I originally asked. It seems that attachments are not possible with sage at this time, so I'm going to have to hack it so that I CAN attach documents. As for CRA, their policy does not pass the common sense test, and I could care less what their opinion/standing on it is.

    Case closed.

  • 0

    I'd be interested to know how you make out.  On the right server, MySQL can store terabytes of data without breaking a sweat, but you would have to add some fields to the database to store the scan objects.  Please keep us posted as to how it goes.