Vito Filippi, Systems & Procedures Analyst from the Fresno County Assessor-Recorder’s Office, shares advice for working with documents, templates and folders.

After implementing Laserfiche, it is time to think about how to integrate it into your organization’s business processes. Designing an organized repository, which allows users to effectively search for, share, access and archive information, is key. Here are some important things to consider when creating document templates and setting up a folder structure.

Working with documents and templates

• Sit down with end users and identify the various document types they deal with on a regular basis. Ask yourself:
  • Are all these documents critical to their business processes?
  • What is the function of each document?
  • How are these documents used?
  • What information in those documents is the most important?
  • How would the users like to access these documents in the future?
• When designing templates and fields, look for commonalities among all the document types.

Example: In the Property Transfers Division, we discovered many pieces of information that all of the document types shared. This led us to create a single Property Transfers template for all 33 different document types.

This single template has allowed our division to:

• Significantly reduce document processing times and increase volume by simplifying data entry.
• Eliminate wasted effort and redundancies.
• Provide faster internal/external customer response times.
• Reuse the same field across multiple templates.

Example: In the Assessor-Recorder’s Office, we assigned the APN field to 17 different templates and the Book-Page field to 5 different templates.

Reusing the same fields helped our staff:

• Quickly find related documents by searching across one field.
• Maintain consistency in data entry.

Setting up an efficient folder structure

• Consolidate your folders. Store related documents in the same folder in order to quickly find documents later.

Example: In the Property Transfers Division, even though we deal with 33 different documents, we only have 19 folders in our directory.

• Make sure your folder structure is flexible to account for changes or challenges that may occur.

Example: Our Exemptions division handles multiple types of exemption documents such as “Church”, “Veterans Affairs” and “Disabled”. Initially we stored them all in one Exemptions folder in the repository. We quickly realized that it was time consuming and inefficient to search through that folder for multiple document types so we reorganized the Exemptions folder to differentiate between different types of documents and built our template to accommodate the common fields among them. As a result, our document retrieval time and customer service improved dramatically.