Local Government:
Pittsylvania County, Virginia - Finance Department
by Christine B. Ilardi, 2008
Filing cabinets. Misfiled documents. Storage facilities. Damaged documents. When the list of challenges associated with paper filing became too much to handle, the Pittsylvania Finance Department reached out to Unity Business Systems for help.
“One major challenge we had was not having enough room to store all of our files; when the files were sent to storage, it was almost impossible to find a document. Also, the conditions of the storage facility were not the best, so documents were not maintained in pristine condition,” said Kim Van Der Hyde, the Finance Director at Pittsylvania County.
Van Der Hyde and company started using their UBS-installed Laserfiche system in March of 2008 for their Accounts Payable functions.
“After the initial set-up, we immediately started scanning all of our Accounts Payable documents—including checks, reports and invoices,” said Van Der Hyde.
UBS Technical Support Director John Geist headed up the team who did the initial installation and training of their system.
“The install was primarily focused on their Accounts Payable area. Their setup included processing invoices which were indexed by Vendor Name and Invoice Number. They also scanned all of their checks into a separate document for each check and used Laserfiche Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to index for retrieval of individual checks,” said Geist. “An interesting thing I noticed was that they had huge phone bills which they would scan and then OCR, enabling them to search for a certain name or phone number within the bill to identify specific calls.”
Van Der Hyde was pleased at how quickly her department was able to start utilizing their new UBS solution. The new way of handling their AP documents marked a drastic improvement from their previous method.
“Before, I personally had to locate paid invoices in the file in order to draw grant monies down from the State of Virginia. The UBS system has allowed me to locate all documents needed for these requests with just the click of a mouse,” said Van Der Hyde.
One clear advantage of a UBS/Laserfiche solution is the time-savings aspect.
“What used to take hours in just pulling files and standing at a copier has been reduced to no more than a few minutes!” said Van Der Hyde.
The Finance department’s main goal was to find a system that was user-friendly and would get the job done.
“We were hoping to find a system that would provide the information we needed, when we needed it. We wanted on-demand turnaround on document searches,” said Van Der Hyde. “I have seen that the system has saved in filing time, the number of copies required, as well as document search time.”
With Unity Business Systems, they found what they were looking for—and more.
“The UBS system has definitely exceeded our expectations. I really like the user-friendliness of the system, as well as the time-savings it provides,” said Van Der Hyde.
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Monday, September 08, 2008 
