Proactive vs. Reactive: Timeline

We know that catching discrepancies within your EDI data before they become major headaches is critical to the health of your business. Our “Proactive vs. Reactive” series of posts will examine how Syncrofy’s various features help you stay on top of your operation to identify data inconsistencies that may require extra attention and promote accountability within your team.  In this post, we’ll take a look at how the Timeline feature can help you find data faster, solves issues more quickly, and avoid costly headaches.

If you work in EDI you’ve realized by now that all data archival systems are not created equal. And it can sometimes be a painful and time-consuming truth to come to terms with.

Documents can be organized by date or type with some organizations even storing inbound and outbound data in completely different directories, oftentimes in an offsite archive. This can make even the simplest document tracking tasks an exercise in futility.

For example, let’s say you send an invoice (810) to your trading partner on the 10th of the month. You would have to manually check to see when they sent you the remittance advice (820) in return.

Based on your experience, it would be roughly a month after the invoice was sent. So you check a month out. Nope, not there. Then the next month. Nothing. Then a month after that.

But what if it came in early? Ah, there it is! You wasted all that time waiting for something that had already arrived, when you could’ve been focusing on other key business improvements!

What if there was a way to visualize all of your documents in a timeline format and track the lifecycle of each one and every associated document with them? A way to stay on top of document processes so you don’t have to manually search for every single one?

If you haven’t already met, allow me to introduce you to the Timeline feature in Syncrofy.

Timeline allows users to track the entire progression of a document, providing full transparency into the date and time of creation, associated documents, and exceptions.

Timeline can also save you when it comes to obtaining full transparency on every document process in your organization. Even regarding specifics you weren’t even made aware of—making the old saying, “you don’t know what you don’t know” completely obsolete.

For example, let’s say you’re wondering if a shipment was sent out for a recent invoice. But what if the answer is three shipments went out.

Without Syncrofy, your search would probably only turn up the one of the outbound shipments for the invoice. How would you know to keep looking for the other two? How would you know when you were done searching?

In Timeline, you would see every correlated document (the three outbound shipments) visualized into a timeline view. You won’t be left wondering if your search just failed to turn something up or if a document was truly missing.

And you don’t have to start at the beginning to view the Timeline. Search for any document in the flow and you’ll be able to see everything, no matter where you begin.

You can even take your transparency a step further by configuring Syncrofy to alert you on the document events that matter most with the Watch feature.

Let’s say you sent out a invoice for a $1M transaction but have yet to receive payment. Instead of going back to check it each day, simply click the “Watch” button within the timeline to receive a real-time notification any time a document is processed.

Timeline also lets you know if there are exceptions associated with any of the documents in the flow and permits users to submit comments to help achieve cross-departmental transparency and facilitate seamless communication between teams.

So say goodbye to the guesswork and manually searching for your data. It’s all in one place with Timeline!

To learn more about how Syncrofy’s Timeline feature helps you stay proactive, check out our Help site. To discover the power of Syncrofy, please visit www.syncrofy.com.