[Playbook] Enabling a “Decentralized” Strategy for Electronic Documents
Here’s the situation: Your commercial lenders feel overwhelmed by the amount of electronic documents that land in their inboxes each day. Financial statements, collateral documents, appraisals, and inventory statements are just a few examples. Printing, scanning, and uploading documents that are already in electronic format doesn’t make sense. Forwarding documents to the loan operations team seems like a safe choice, but collaborating via email opens the door to oversights. Surely there’s a better way.
This article shares two “plays” for enabling a “decentralized” document management strategy—without giving up too much control.
Play #1: ePrinting to a Dedicated Uploads Folder in Your Imaging System
Even highly intuitive systems like AccuAccount still require a certain amount of product knowledge for effective use. Even if your lenders had time to focus on learning the product, your financial institution may not want to enable upload access for every person. That’s why using a virtual printer solution, such as our AccuPrint product, can be a smart choice.
Step 1: Start by determining who requires access to the virtual printer software. Our AccuPrint solution is available as an unlimited license, which means there are no additional software costs for installing it on every workstation. AccuPrint is straightforward for non-technical users, but we also offer on-demand and live training resources.
Step 2: Users simply drag and drop electronic documents to the AccuPrint icon on their workstations. AccuPrint will prompt users to associate documents with a customer (or member) and indicate the type of document (i.e., customer financial statement, tax return, etc.). Optionally, users can add an account number and comments. Documents are saved to an “uploads” folder in AccuAccount, which is essentially a holding place for final review.
Best practice: Although you can drag and drop multi-customer, multi-member, or multi-document PDFs into AccuPrint, it’s more efficient and effective to process one document at a time.
Step 3: Dashboards in AccuAccount keep QC and loan ops teams informed about recent uploads via AccuPrint. AccuAccount offers a convenient review workflow to ensure each document is associated with the correct customer or member’s electronic file.
Play #2: Collecting Documents in a Network Drive Folder
If installing AccuPrint and training staff seems like too much change, you could allow users to save electronic documents in a central folder on your network drive. This approach is similar to the first play, but with two obvious differences:
Users upload documents to your network drive: This may feel more familiar for users, but it also creates a new data silo at your financial institution. Also, there may not be an easy way to collect metadata about documents—such as associated customers, members, or document types. Properly naming documents is essential.
Reviewers must monitor and maintain your network drive folder: Unless custom notifications are engineered into your network drive ecosystem, QC and loan ops staff will have to manually check for new documents and then drag and drop them into the correct location in AccuAccount. There’s also the question about what to do after documents have been moved to AccuAccount. Should they be moved to an archive folder or deleted?
Time for a Decentralized Imaging Strategy?
With the right technology and processes, your financial institution can move one step closer toward realizing a decentralized imaging strategy.
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