{"id":23898,"date":"2020-02-12T09:00:11","date_gmt":"2020-02-12T08:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-gb\/industry\/blog\/?p=23898"},"modified":"2020-02-11T17:46:12","modified_gmt":"2020-02-11T16:46:12","slug":"how-to-work-smarter-in-social-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-gb\/industry\/blog\/government\/2020\/02\/12\/how-to-work-smarter-in-social-care\/","title":{"rendered":"How to work smarter, reduce admin, and generate data-driven insights in social care"},"content":{"rendered":"

Handling documents such as invoices is part of a typical business process. For councils who handle adult social care, these invoices can go into the thousands. This is often a time-consuming process that clogs up your administrator\u2019s time.<\/p>\n

With modern technology and AI, using cognitive services and leveraging Microsoft\u2019s ecosystem such as Office 365 and the Power Platform, you could save up to two weeks of time every month in your administration department.<\/p>\n

The best bit: you don\u2019t need to be a developer to achieve this. By transforming your document driven process, not only will you be able to save hours of staff time, you\u2019ll also be able to extract data for reporting purposes and use the insights to make more informed business decisions.<\/p>\n

Working smarter with the help of technology<\/h2>\n

\"MaleImagine receiving 5,000 paper\/electronic invoices each month. In the context of adult social care, it\u2019s likely to be a lot higher than this for some councils.<\/p>\n

These invoices need to be receipted and reconciled to extract key information such as invoice date, invoice number, total amount, invoice sender, and recipient. This data would then typically be stored in an Excel file.<\/p>\n

Could you imagine how long this manual process would take? An admin would have to extract the data from a PDF received via email and then copy it across to the Excel file.<\/p>\n

Now, let\u2019s assume we could find a way to improve this process and only save one minute per each invoice. That would be a saving of 5,000 minutes. 83 hours every month for a single business process. Imagine what else you could achieve with that time instead.<\/p>\n

Here is how we do it:<\/p>\n

In SharePoint Online:<\/h3>\n