Imaging of Financial Documents

As discussed in the section Source Documents and the Audit Trail, it is important that source documents supporting financial transactions posted to the Financial Information System are easily accessible. As detailed in the section on Records Management, the source document could be an expense reimbursement form with receipts, a bank deposit slip, a journal entry form, or numerous other source documents.

In the past, most issues surrounding access to source documents were related to the appropriate file plan for paper documents, including how long to keep them in current files and when to archive or destroy them.  Recently, technological improvements, combined with the relatively low cost of imaging / storing documents electronically has made this option attractive to departments.

At the University of Toronto, departments are required to maintain original documents in accordance with the U of T File Plan.  The original document may be a paper, electronic, or digitally imaged document (expense report and receipts, accountable advance request, bank deposit slip, etc.)

Departments who chose to, as part of its own records management plan, scan* and maintain internal financial documents in digital format, may destroy the original paper document(s) under certain circumstances.  For further information, please refer to the University’s guideline on the use of electronic signatures for internal financial documents.

*Scanned documents can be “attached” to the transaction document number within FIS (see the SIMULATION: Attaching Documents to FIS Transactions for instructions on how to do this). 

Last revision: October 9, 2023