The Town’s government offices had a major record keeping problem - paper documents were filling onsite and offsite storage facilities at a costly pace. Town meeting minutes, planning and zoning case files, registration forms, claims and lawsuits all needed to be permanently archived. Searching for important documents in filing cabinets and vaults had become a daunting task and offsite document storage and retrieval was a growing expense.

Integration of DocuWare with existing software was a must

After attending a document management seminar, the town’s IT Coordinator knew that implementing a document management system would solve their paper file problems. The top priority was finding a solution that could seamlessly integrate with their existing software such as RPS (New York State Real Property Tax System), BAS’s Municipal Clerk Licensing System, a software application that automates Town Clerk offices and ABBYY.

Today, the Town has over half a million documents stored in DocuWare. The Town Clerk’s office was the first place DocuWare was rolled out because this office manages all public records, such as real estate and land records; birth, death and marriage certificates, sporting licenses, dog licenses, records of board and commission meetings and more.

Secure, quickly accessible digital records

Before implementing DocuWare, finding certain documents could take days or weeks, depending on the amount of research involved. With DocuWare in place, retrieval is easy and happens in seconds.

 New records are now stored electronically and the Town’s in-house staff back scanned existing paper records, starting with newer and frequently accessed documents. Once the contents of each box from the storage facility were scanned into the system, the paper records were destroyed.

 Expanded use across multiple departments

Every five years, the Town of Henrietta conducts a comprehensive land use survey. As part of the process, the Town sends out a 6-page questionnaire to more than 15,000 households. The returned questionnaires had to be manually entered into a database. With DocuWare’s integration with ABBYY, all responses were imported electronically into an Excel file. This was then exported to DocuWare where information could be accessed as needed.