Workflow Sample: Quotation File, Automatic Backup to Google Drive

I'm afraid to say that there are only few companies that have visualized the issuance of their 'Quotes' and 'Invoices'. There are not so many of the personnel in charge who can answer immediately to the question about

How many Quotes have been issued now?
How many Invoices have been issued now?

In most of the companies, personnels of Sales or Accounting create each quote and invoice manually in Excel, print them out, get approved by manager, copy them for backup, enclose them and finally post them... With all their effort they created them with the computer, but eventually they are handled in an analog way. And they are hard to be aggregated.

The 'Invoice Issuance flow' below is so to speak a "Billing system".
The 'Billing Data' that has been entered into Workflow will be approved through Workflow. Using the data, the Invoice PDF is generated. In other words, Invoice PDF will not be created except from this system. You can centralize management of issuance of invoice PDF. When you could develop a Business Process this far, for example you can download business data of 'Issued date', 'Billing company name', 'Billing amount' in CSV format. That means you can create a 'Real-time Billing Ledger' anytime.

By the way, the excellence of this Workflow is to throw backup of 'Invoice file' automatically to a specific folder in "Google Drive", the Online Storage.

[Invoice Issuance - Auto Backup flow]

[Invoice Issuance - Auto Backup flow: "1. Input" screen]

[Auto-generated PDF]

"Fraud and trouble" that happens in the work process to leave to humans, depends on the "moral and skill" of the person in charge, of course.

Although it depends the business and business category, fraud concerning Invoice issuance actually could be occurring habitually, if the company was in the scale of over 1000 employees. And among them, there might be a case of Fictitious invoice issuance that leads to 'Misstatements in financial statements', or might be a case of multiple issuance of invoice that leads to 'Peculation and Embezzlement'.

In terms of internal control, I would like to continue to explore "Business Processes that prevent the occurrence of fraud". It is very effective to replace the operations that have been left to the human by automated processing by the computer as much as possible. Also, it is good "Mutually supervising" by extending the authorization for viewing Billing data to raise transparency. In some cases, "data analysis activities" would proceed as a side effect. ("Risk of confidential information leakage" will grow on the other hand.)

[Download]