Why and how do you put barcodes on your accounting forms. Which ones can help you the most? This question when addressed properly can save a lot of time and effort on your ERP system's users part as well as on your business partners. It is not difficult to add barcodes to forms such as checks, purchase orders, sales orders, etc. There are even free fonts available which make adding the barcodes as easy as adding any other text string to an ERP system form. Any process where the ERP user has to read a form and retype the information into a computer is a potential process which can be improved by a barcode on the form. Since errors cost an average of about $50 to find and correct, it is well worth it to try to reduce them. The careful thought comes in during the selection process. Logical things to barcode include:
- Document numbers - e.g. check numbers, sales order numbers, purchase order numbers, invoice numbers. In most ERP systems such as Sage Pro ERP, ACCPAC ERP and others, there is a place to enter the document number to pull up the document out of the database. This is a logical place to scan the barcode on the hardcopy if that is what you are working from.
- Part numbers, Lot numbers and serial numbers. You might not benefit from this directly, but your customer's recieving department will then have the ability to scan this information at the time the goods are recieved and have fewer errors than if they had to manually enter the lot/serial number.
- "our vendor number" If you track your customer's vendor number for your company, you can save them time by putting this information in barcode form on the invoice/packing slip, etc. You would want to do this if they could benefit from it and to provide a higher grade of customer service than your competitors.
- Barcode Labels for items that need to be quality tracked. Say your company received a credit for defects in a roll of material but you had to provide your PO number in the return form. You could print out one bar code label for each roll with the PO number on it, and attach it to the roll container. That way, the PO number is physically linked to the roll.
- Amounts. If the amount on an invoice were bar coded, whoever had to enter the invoice would not have to retype the amount.
As always, PC Methods would be happy to provide you with consulting and advice on putting barcodes on your ERP forms. Just click the Contact Us link, or email or call us at the number above.