Managing invoices and other accounting documents with metadata
Metadrive is a tool developed by Evenbytes that saves people a great deal of time when searching for files. But how does it do it?
Metadrive benefits any company, whatever its sector. So let us walk through an example in which the tool is extremely useful and which addresses a need every company faces: accounting.
Everyone can relate to this case, because sooner or later we all have to deal with invoice management, whether as the issuer or the recipient. You can try Metadrive here. For this particular example, imagine you are a service provider issuing 50 invoices to your customers every month. You also store them in a Shared Drive within your organisation. This tool offers many advantages, but it does not let you create labels (metadata) assigned to your documents, a capability that Metadrive provides. Assigning these labels would let you easily find or filter all your documents by whichever characteristics matter to you at any given moment: for example, issue date, payment status, customer and so on.
This is especially relevant when, for example, you work with four other people in your department and want to check whether any of your colleagues has issued a specific invoice.
You can also filter these invoices by payment status using the advanced filtering feature. That way, you can quickly see which customers have already paid for the service and which still have payments outstanding.
You can also create and apply several custom views so that only certain specific “labels” assigned to your documents are displayed. For example, you can create a view that combines the invoice issue date, the customer and the payment status. Within the same view, you can sort them by date or status, as shown in the image below.
You can apply dynamic filters to this view to show only the invoices created within a given number of days before today (see the image below). For example, only those issued in the last 90 days.
The activity log feature is also a clear benefit in this particular case, because it gives you a clear record of the changes made to properties, folders and/or documents, including the date, time and user who made them. For example, you can see when the “status” property changed from “pending” to “paid” and who made that change, so you know which colleague to ask if you have any questions about that customer.
Metadrive is also integrated with Google Drive comments, so as well as viewing them, you can add further remarks, edit them, resolve them and more. And all without leaving Metadrive! To conclude, we can say that Metadrive is useful for all kinds of companies and departments. Although we have just looked at how it applies to invoice management, it is easy to think of many other day-to-day activities that can be enhanced by the features Metadrive offers.
