Xtracta Blog

Businesses face many challenges in the modern business environment. Now more than ever, business leaders need to be constantly on lookout for more effective ways of managing jobs. By staying stagnant and not improving processes over time, will mean both short and long term growth will be affected. You may be thinking “We have done it this way for the last 10 years, why should we change now?” By evaluating your business continuously and investing in more efficient processes such as data Automation and extraction, your staff can spend more time on value added activities rather than lengthy, repetitive tasks.…

Accounting automation -it’s a term that has been bouncing around the accounting and bookkeeping industry for the past few years. Automation allows accountants and bookkeepers to spend less time on the manual labour they have traditionally spent a majority of their roles on. That sounds ideal, however there has been discussion within the industry that automation is a tool that will replace accountants completely. And it’s partly true. Automation reduces the amount of time spent on manual tasks, for example data extraction, such as ABM Billfeeds, a service that is offered to all customers of ABM’s accounting software. This service…

Document scanning is often given little thought or consideration. A bit of planning and knowledge about how to approach it can really help the outcomes and make the process faster and more hassle free. Scanner Choice There are a huge number of scanners available on the market. Some are dedicated single function scanners while other are part of a multi-function device with a scanning function alongside printing and copying. When making the choice of what scanner you want to use the three main factors affecting your decision are: Volume of documents you wish to process Your desired image quality level…

Authored By: Jonathan Spence I'll start by admitting it, efficienize is NOT a word. Yes I know, but without those who promote new words how will they ever be accepted into a language?! In any case I thought I would do a quick search to see what the linguists had to say on the subject matter and they were very much adamant that indeed it is not yet a word even though its use is arguably spreading. In one of the forums where they were discussing this, a user suggested a better word to use: Kaizen. Kaizen or 改善 (for…

Authored By: Jonathan Spence There are two big stories in the personal transport news these days, Uber (and of course its compatriots in the ride-sharing space like Lyft) & Driverless cars. Each is in itself quite an amazing proposition. Let's start with Uber. On the surface it looks like a win-win for both sides; the passenger and the driver. For the passenger it's an exceedingly easy service to use providing a known fare value, easy payment and potentially reduced prices for otherwise expensive taxi travel. On the driver side it "democratises" (I really dislike that term!) the ability for people…

Authored By: Jonathan Spence "I'll be back" - the infamous words of arguably the most famous & bad-ass cyborg around. Arnold Schwarzenegger does seem to be making a move back to acting after a stint "governating" California so those words could arguably hold true! For those who don't know, cyborg is a word to describe a robot which includes both biological and mechanical components, in the Terminator's case he was a robot on the inside with skin on the outside. Now I know you may be asking, how is this relevant to an Xtracta orientated post but stick with me!…