Background

CLIENT is an accounting firm in Philadelphia, PA specializing in personal and business tax accounting. Home to 15 practitioners CLIENT delivers services in the areas of Accounting, Licensing, Real Estate and Consulting. CLIENT. concentrates largely on the Hispanic market in the Delaware Valley.

Challenge

Due to the success of the firm in cornering the seasonal Philadelphia Hispanic tax market, CLIENT found themselves flooded from head-to-toe, wall-to-wall with paper files from client interactions. This impacted CLIENT's ability to:

• Take on new clientele
• Quickly retrieve previous client information
• Expand due to the exponential expansion of filing costs per new customer.

Solution

In order to enable CLIENT to continue to grow in a controlled premeditated manner an Electronic Paperless Office System was implemented centralizing documents on a terabyte file server with redundant drives.

The first component was a paperless printing system. This system allowed accountants to use any application to print to the Electronic Filing Cabinet as if it were a printer in their office. This was crucial to obtaining the objective because it lowered the level of paper creation allowing Accountants to continue their every day operations printing the client's copy to the printer and the office's copy to the server.

The second component was a Network Scan Delivery System which enabled an industrial sheet fed scanner to be used to take the existing paper files and store them to the server. This was crucial to start the long process of bringing the office's files out of the wall and easily accessible from the server.

The third and most crucial component was the Electronic Filing and Categorizing Application. This application was the keystone to the System as a whole because it created a consistent workflow for any member of the office to store and categorize any scanned or printed document. The application presents all scanned and printed documents allowing users to assign a client number, a type of document and notes while showing a screen copy of the document to jog memory and limit errors.

The key here is scan now, categorize later. This allows an automated approach to document storage whereby like actions can be done in batches increasing productivity and performance.

Results

The system has been in use for two years as of the writing of this document with only two service calls. One to jump start it due to a power outage and the second to reconnect a network cable unplugged by an office ghost.

In the meantime scanning has increased with four full-time temp workers scanning documents for months at a time each year in an attempt to reduce the already accumulated office filing. The client list on storage is in the thousands and documents on file are above 9000.

The business has grown to surpass all expectations and the paperless office system is a cornerstone to the daily productivity of CLIENT Inc.

This is an example of the value SkyTech Systems, Inc. creates for its clients. We concentrate on workflow and process while keeping an eye on cost. We provide custom application solutions for:

"When Office isn't enough"