How much billable time do you waste searching for documents?

July 7, 2023 Kamran Rajah

Office jobs are never as efficient as they should be — while many work 7.5 to 8-hour days, that doesn’t mean they spend all that time actually working. So when information needs to be found, you can spend precious moments trying to find it and neglect other critical business tasks.

In this high-tech ever-changing world, speed and quality are of equal weight. Sure, it’s great if you’ve got access to unique information, but if you can’t find it quickly, you’re stagnating.

So what’s the answer? Can technology make a difference to the time you spend searching for information? We’ll give you a clue; yes.

Driving efficiency

According to a study conducted by the McKinsey Global Institute, research showed that knowledge workers spend 19% of their time searching for and gathering information.

Now, whilst not all business professionals push the same amount of data as knowledge workers, parallels can be made here. Simply put, searching for information and taking precious hours out of your day can be unavoidable — but that doesn’t mean it should take up nearly a fifth of your working week.

The power of automation

What if there was a way you could set up your digital platforms to suit your specific requirements and find your documents quicker?

Automating your processes could change how you scour for documents. Just search for what you need, and your software can do the rest, finding the relevant file across multiple locations. This is generally known as a universal search.

Universal search has existed for a while now, first on desktop computers through their operating systems and later through cloud-based platforms like Google Drive and iCloud.

Nowadays, most platforms have some form of universal search functionality with varying degrees of usefulness and efficiency.

AIRPA’s universal search is different, because it’s connected to all of your accounting platforms. The more of your business suite you add, the more widely it can search. 


We have a list of partners we work with, but truthfully nearly every business suite can be connected in one way or another, giving you scalability for your search functionality.

How does AIRPA help?

AIRPA’s solution works exactly like this:

  1. connect your systems
  2. connect the data sources
  3. search for what you need in the global search
  4. done!

It’s that simple. And if we said it saved hours of time, we’d be underselling it. It’s a powerful business tool which does away with the wasted hours of manual effort and replaces them with a quick, efficient search. 

This can make a vast difference in how you respond to your clients. You can go straight back to them with the information they needed with little to no downtime.

AIRPA has a host of different tools in its arsenal, all of them designed to boost accounting and business efficiency and turn that time saved into time you can spend on other areas of your business.

Want to see how AIRPA can save you time looking for documents? Why not book a demo or use our free trial.