BUSINESS TYPE:
Outsourced Accounting Services

BUSINESS PROBLEM:
Collecting all required client documents and preparing annual summaries.

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?’
‘To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.’
‘The dog did nothing in the night-time.’
‘That was the curious incident,’ remarked Sherlock Holmes.”

Arthur Conan Doyle, Silver Blaze, 1892

This famous dialog, commonly known as “The dog not barking,” illustrates a problem common to many businesses: Sometimes, what you have can hurt you. Other times, what you don’t have can hurt you.

Many processes and transactions require full documentation and can also require documentation from others: Licenses, certifications, signatures, and document sets often must be current, present, renewed, or on hand.

Such was the case with Remote Quality Bookkeeping, an outsourced bookkeeping, and accounting firm based in Wells, Maine.

RQB focuses on franchise businesses and has clients across the country. Every month the firm collects and reconciles multiple credit card bills and bank statements for each location. At the end of the year, RQB prepares and ships out each year’s records for each client – every statement, every report. In the bad old days, this was all done by hand. The cost of the binders alone was $6,000. Add on shipping. Then add on staff time as they copied, printed, and collated every item for every client. The time and money costs were enormous.

Solving the Problem, Part I: Going Digital

Switching from paper to electronic files solved a lot of the problems. Laserfiche works natively with scanned images, pdf files, spreadsheets, and any Office documents. Advanced searching lets the users find any document from any client in seconds instead of minutes or even hours. At the end of the year, all client documents could be quickly sorted and saved as pdf files rather than shipping heavy binders. RQB could ship a tiny thumb drive. The physical prep savings alone were enormous.

Solving the Problem, Part II: Did we get everything?

Now we get to The Dog Not Barking, or in RQB terms, the statement not found. While the document prep was greatly accelerated, there was still a mad scramble for those last items needed to complete the picture. If you need every statement for every client, and those clients are opening and closing different accounts, it’s hard to be sure you have everything you need.

RQB asked: Is there a way to track what we are supposed to have all along instead of just at the end of the year?

Enter Laserfiche Workflow. This powerful tool lets us build a system that monitors:

• What RQB should have

• What RQB does have

• What RQB is missing

For every client, for every account, even as different accounts are opened and closed. The client’s progress can be corrected throughout the year instead of in a frantic dash. RQB’s CEO Mark Kilduff said, “Glowing words go here.”

RQB is an excellent example of the trend of ECM Systems: Instead of capturing material at the end of the process, smart companies are starting on receipt and using the ECM system to facilitate and speed up all of their work processes.