Going paperless - I don't think any office can really fulfill that dream, but certainly it benefits all to cut down on paper. We had to start by thinking about what we really needed to keep. We do use offsite storage to keep documents that are required for a certain time. We are slowly working toward eliminating that large pile of paper in favor of scanned documents.
We've been scanning our daily mail related to donations for over a year now. Our receptionist is responsible for the daily openning and scanning of mail. Everything to do with a donation - check, credit card donation form, accompanying documentation gets scanned into one file and saved in a network directory using the date for the file name. We have a cover sheet for each day's mail that is a form for future annotation.
Prior to the scanning, our receptionist runs a calculator tape totaling all of the donations received. This tape goes to our database specialist so she is aware that the day's mail has been scanned. Our DB specialist uses the pdf to enter any event registrations in RE. This assures that the registration pops up for the gift entry person when entering the gift into batch. The pdf is annotated that event registrations were accomplished.
The DB specialist moves the tape to the 'hooter line' at our gift entry area - a little clothesline of daily mail tapes. One of gift entry processors will take a tape and work on entrying that day's mail into batch in RE. We record the fund, appeal and any other notes on each page of the pdf that has a check, cc form, etc. Our gift entry personnel have dual monitors so they can have the pdf on one screen and the RE batch on the other. This person also 'blacks out' any private information on each page of the pdf. We currently use eCopy Paperworks for pdf annotation.
After the mail is entered into batch, the scanned document remains in the archive area on the network. Only certain people have access to this directory. It is organized by year, month and then each pdf is dated in the name. We also save all acknowledgements in the same structure.
This has really been working well for us. We may take it one step further - we just previewed a demo of Papersave. There was a lot we liked about it: it's built around workflow; it may shorten our batch entry process; there is a scan later function; and of course, the documentation is linked to the appropriate record in FE or RE. More to come on that later.
Happy Thanksgiving to all - Nora
No comments:
Post a Comment