Customer Appreciation Week 2019 – DocuWare’s AP Digital Workflows Enable Districtwide Data Transparency and Protect Environment for Bend Park & Recreation District

DocuWare’s second annual Customer Appreciation Week is here! July 18 is the next official Get to Know Your Customer Day but at DocuWare we celebrate in June – and why leave it to just one day? Each day this week, we will be honoring one customer. Visit our Modern Digital Business blog daily to read each DocuWare success story and see photos of the festivities. Follow all the celebrations on social media at #DocuWareCustomerWeek.

BPRD needed a solution to easily access important data across its seven office buildings, in order to have transparency on its expenses. Previously, they had to manually pull needed invoices and courier them between offices, increasing the risk of misplaced or lost documents. The manual processes were too cumbersome, even taking about 1.5 hours to look for certain data.

DocuWare had already been in place at BPRD but was only being used for general document storage including contracts and board meeting minutes. Once Veronica Ramos, Accounting Specialist, joined the team, she saw it as a great, easy-to-use solution to accelerate the transparency and availability of data to the managers across their office locations. She spearheaded implementing AP digital workflows throughout the district.

By fully utilizing DocuWare’s digital workflows and centralized digital database, BPRD increased data transparency districtwide, saved a substantial amount of work time, and reduced costs. 90% of invoices now arrive into an AP inbox that Veronica monitors. Recurring invoices that come into the inbox are stored automatically in DocuWare using Intelligent Indexing, artificial intelligence that indexes text on documents, which in turn kicks off a workflow that automatically sends the invoices to managers at different offices for review. This saves time for Veronica, the AP team, and couriers from manually searching and delivering invoices in person. For one-off invoices, Veronica is able to index and store them into DocuWare right from her inbox and easily route them to the appropriate managers. She is able to scan checks and attach them to the respective invoices so there is a clear trail of everything as well. For getting her colleagues onboard to the new process, she was able to train managers in just 15 minutes on how to view and pull up invoices in DocuWare in seconds. As a great example, one business manager was able to pull expense data on phone bills within five minutes; historically, this would have taken hours. DocuWare allows BPRD to put intuitive search tools in the hands of users; the managers don’t need to call the AP department every time they need to look at an invoice which in turn saves everyone time to work and focus on other projects. There is no need for filling up physical filing cabinets anymore; they currently store about 41,000 digital documents in their AP file cabinet in DocuWare and this number is growing. 

BPRD is also reducing costs by eliminating the reliance on couriers and cutting back on printing 32,000 finance-related paper documents per year.

“The biggest benefit DocuWare has brought us is the ability to have information available at our fingertips. We can easily look it up in DocuWare and see one, two or more years’ worth of data, bringing us incredible transparency,” said Veronica Ramos, Accounting Specialist at BPRD.

BPRD is expanding their DocuWare use by purchasing DocuWare Forms, digital web forms, to use in their HR department. Veronica is eager to assist the HR department with building out their DocuWare strategy, since now she has more time to work on additional high value projects to bring even more efficiencies to her organization.

DocuWare is also a major player in the park district’s paperless initiative to ease the waste burden on the environment and planet; they are well on their way to becoming a sustainability leader in the community.

Check out DocuWare for Invoice Processing in action and see how it can streamline and automate your AP processing:

The BPRD team was very excited to receive their Customer Appreciation plaque, presented by DocuWare Regional Sales Director Caleb Wolfe. They celebrated the day with a lunch from their local restaurant of choice, Kebaba - on us!