Accountants

Document management solution designed for accountants

Document management solution designed for accountants

Accounting firms face many challenges when it comes to managing the vast amounts of client data you handle each day. The work you do is critical for successful outcomes and profitable work completed on time.

When you consider that the information you use comes in many forms, from emails, to paper, to Word and Excel documents to reports generated by your accounting software. It often means you have information all over the place and in different formats.

You have deadlines to meet and the pressure rises as you try to meet client demands and expectations, there are only so many hours in a day.

What if everything you wanted was available at your fingertips the moment you needed it. As if the file was open to the required page on your desk within a second or two?

This is the reality of using M-Files as your document management solution.

It not only creates ‘one point of truth’ for all your knowledge and information, it also manages and simplifies the way that it passes across your desk. E-signatures are very helpful for signing off on jobs.

How to realise a paper-less office at your firm

A paper-less office can be achieved. However, there are going to be practical needs like writing on working papers as many prefer to work this way. Being electronic, there is no need to file and re-file this information time and time again.

It can all be stored and accessed from M-Files and then the few pages you need to write on can be produced.

There is so much time wasted on manual information management processes, let’s use the technology at hand to increase productivity dramatically and reduce stress levels. You may even get to go to lunch on time.

paperless-accounting-software

A one stop shop for all of your knowledge management needs

Electronic filing of all information coming in and out of the business will produce great results in and of itself.

Accountants find that the real benefits are realised when we automate the way this information is tracked and managed and processed through the office.

M-Files is not just a smart way to find and file but it also includes automatic version control; document collaboration tools, assignments and workflows to replace manual in-trays.

Being based on a SQL database we can also link in directly to your existing systems like MYOB, Xero, HandiTax, etc., this means that the phone number you need is with the document so you can action that follow up without having to go to two places to gather the document and then the phone number.

Client queries can now be answered on the spot.

Click on one of the buttons below to get a free trial or an instant quote. As Accountants you will be impressed with the small outlay and ease of use.

To read the full transcript of the video, please click here

Accountants/Debt Collectors/Finance/Mortgage Brokers video transcript

Overview

Hello and welcome to this demonstration of M-Files that we have put together specifically for Accountants, Auditors, Debt Collectors, Finance and Mortgage Brokers. To give you an overview of where we’re headed today. What this is all about is a way to centralize all the company’s information so whether that’s your paper-based files, your electronic documents, emails, invoices, reports, anything coming in or going out is all captured into a central system. We need to be able to achieve that quicker and easier than your current manual processes so we’re not adding a Job to the day but most importantly, it’s all about retrieval, allowing you and the staff to find anything instantly but by any means that make sense to you. Who it’s from, what it’s about, when it came in, via a keyword, off a document, a tax file number and we have it up on the screen immediately, so it’s primarily designed as a productivity tool. In the third and last part of the process that I’ll show you, we’ll also look at where it all comes together, things like assignments, workflows, version control, document collaboration, all the actionable items that you do with this information and how that can be tracked, managed and simplified.

A little About Us

Here’s a little bit of information about M-Files and why we enjoy working with them. We have been specializing in information management solutions for over 20 years. We do a lot of work across your industry and I’m sure that you’ll find this of great value. These are some of the current main points that we often find when dealing in the industry and I’m sure that some of these would resonate with you, if not all of them, and we’ll show you how M-Files solves all these problems. Let’s have a look, let’s see how it all works.

Your Security

Now the whole system’s password-protected so we’ve got a login, which means we can set up different security levels for different people within the organization. There might be general filing area that everyone can see. There might be HR and payroll that only two or three people can access. Different security levels depending on what’s required. From there we can set up individual user rights, where some people get to annotate, edit, append, delete, and other people get read-only rights. Behind the scenes, every action that is taken within the system is automatically tracked and recorded. You know who’s looked at what document when, who’s approved a quote, who’s updated a version. Any of those actionable items are now automatically tracked and recorded. The nice thing about M-Files is it looks and feels like Windows Explorer so there’s really no learning curve. Where you’ve got server drives, and folders and subfolders all the way down to a folder that we’ve put together for your Client Bloggs if we click on this folder just like Windows Explorer we get a list of documents, and like Windows Explorer if we click on a document you get a preview of that on the right-hand side.

Familiarity

The nice thing about this being based on a folder structure is, it’s instantly usable. We’re all familiar with it, but, of course the problem with folder-based systems is they don’t work. If you name it incorrectly, put it in the wrong spot, if you and I have differing opinions on how we think it should be named, filed, it can be difficult to find and retrieve. We take a vastly different approach, instead of having to name the document correctly and put it in the right spot, what if we had dozens of different links that linked back to it, and you could search for a bite like, who it’s from, what it’s about, when it came in, via keyword off a document and we have it up on the screen immediately. We call the links metadata. Metadata for this document is listed at the bottom where we’ve noted who the overall Client is, that we’re working with the Job that we’re doing for them, which Entity, it is that we’re working with, who your Accountant or Account Manager is, document dates, types, workflows, assignments etc. Because we tend to file and find using metadata, the old folder-based search method generally becomes redundant. This example of metadata is just that. We will custom build this specifically around your organization, your procedures your processes and naming conventions. We’ll also do it department by department, but we’ll use this as a generic example.

Capturing Information/Documents

Looking at the first part of the system, let’s look at ways of capturing information to make sure the input process is quick and easy. Let’s say we’ve got some correspondence to one of your Clients. This might be on letterhead, it might be a Word document, a PDF, it could be a spreadsheet as a working file, it could be a photo, a video. Any file format whatsoever can be saved into the system. How do we save it? The same way you do now, we simply click on save but instead of saving it in your folders on your server, we now save it in M-Files that lives on your server. M-Files asks us to categorize this, so would you put this under Client files, company administration, that’s restricted, general admin that everybody can see, HR. You have various groups and departments already established, and we will custom build the

departments. Inside a department you have document types, so we have contracts, correspondence, working files, etc. Not only will we create the departments for you and with you, but we’ll also create your document types to marry up with what you already have.

In this example we’re going to call it Client correspondence and it says all great which Job is that for. Instead of having to type them all in what if we could pick this from a pre-set list. What if this list came from your Client tracking databases that you’d most likely have, products like Handy Tax, Solution Six, there’s various ones that are out there and we can link into those databases and get information from them so we’re not having to type it in. When we select our Job for Bloggs and file, it says I know things about this Job, I know who our overriding Client is, I know who your Accountant or Account Manager is. It asks me to fill out auto fields and we say yes. These are what we call parent-child fields. When you select one piece of information, it goes to fill out the rest for you. It’s just an example, but we’re trying to give you the idea that M-Files will fill out the bulk of these fields. If you wanted a tax file number put in or a follow up date, for any of those types of extra pieces of metadata that can be automatically filled out. We pop in today’s date. The date it is created, that one’s added. It’s fast. You continue to work on the document as you normally do and now that we’re finished with it, it is saved into the system and we have captured our first document, our letter to Bill Bloggs. The preview is shown on the right and the metadata that we’ve just captured is now listed at the bottom.

Templates

Let’s do this again, but a far quicker and easier way. Because M-Files runs all day you can build new documents from within the system. Instead of building a document from scratch, under Client files, one of our Clients has requested a Job report, an update of where we are up to with their current Job or project. It launches our reporting template. The nice thing about managing templates in here is that if we had a Michael of the world change our reporting template it is then globally changed. It’s a great place to manage workplace health and safety, leave applications, any common templates that you’re using can all be tracked and managed here. It fills out the bulk of the filing fields for me, so I don’t have to do any of that. All I do is pop in today’s date and it even sets up an automatic naming convention. We hit create and our template is launched, which is in Word and we have your standard Job report, we have your letterhead on top and I’ve asked them to fill out the bulk of the filing fields for me. These items in dark grey are metadata that’s come from M-Files and being inserted into your document. Often these items from M-Files have come from your existing Client databases, but if you wanted to put in additional metadata like perhaps the documents version number, then using our M-Files tab which follows you around in the office suite, we can insert additional metadata. In this case we want to pop in the version number and that’s another item in dark grey. Later I’m going to change this version, and you’ll see that it will go from version one to version two. We’re finished of this one, so we save this into the system and we’ve captured our second document. Our preview of it is shown on the right. Our metadata is listed at the bottom. Now I’ve set up an automatic naming convention where it named what it is, who it’s for and the Job we’re doing for them. I didn’t have to fill any of this out, I didn’t have to spell it correctly, I didn’t have to adhere to your crazy rules about how we’re supposed to file things in this office, it did it all for me. It also means that everything going in and out of the building is named in a consistent method.

Capture Emails Quickly

Let’s have a look at emails. Now emails are notoriously difficult to capture and file. Some of the problems with emails, first it is an editable type document they’re sent to you as an individual. They’ve often got attachments with them. You don’t know whether you’ve dealt with it or not and then six months later you run out of space and you delete them, which is a disaster. Luckily M-Files integrates into the Outlook system so to file them, all we simply do, is drag and drop it I’ll just file these previous emails now. This email, I see, is an IT agreement from our IT Supplier, so to me that sounds like company correspondence. All we do is drag and drop it into this folder and it fills out all the filing fields for me. It puts in the subject line based on the subject line of your email, the dates of email, addresses, there’s really nothing to do but hit create and that one’s added to M-Files fast. You’ve automatically complied with the Electronic Transaction Act. It’s all backed up on the server. Now a couple of nice things to note when you file an email in M-Files, it’s given a blue category, so visually I can see that one out of four emails have been dealt with. Now if I emailed this through to you and Michelle in your office, who’s responsible for filing it. Of course, no idea, you both might do it, neither of you may do it, so let’s say Michelle has filed it. When you go to file it into the system, it tells you it’s already been done. It saves on email duplication. How much time and space are wasted capturing duplicate emails? The file format that we save this in, is an Outlook email format, so when you open it you can reply, forward or open the attachments. We’ve got it stored as a useful email message not as a piece of paper in a filing cabinet. Now I’m going to file another email but do this one slightly differently. This one has an attachment in it and often when people email you an attachment, it’s not so much the email you’re after it’s more the attachments that you’re looking for. I’m going to ask M-Files to separate out the email and the attachment and file them automatically. Because, this is from one of our Clients we’ll put this under Client correspondence. M-Files fills out the bulk of the filing fields. All I have to do is fill out the particular Job and M-Files does everything else for me. Now if I was working on this Job currently, instead of just having Client correspondence, I might have correspondence for Bloggs financial report and I wouldn’t have to fill out any of the questions. I hit create, it’s added to M-Files, it gets a blue category. When we go into the M-Files system, instead of simply having an email which we can click on and view, this one’s been put in a folder and in our folder. We have our email that we can use if we wish but more importantly the attachment has been separated for me. If you were to search for the word cabinets within your filing system, it would take you straight to your attachment, which is what you really wanted. You’ve also got your email there as well.

Scanning

If you needed a document now and if it’s a piece of paper, we can run it through a high-speed scanner. We often use document fed scanners like this, where you can load up a stack of pages. It’ll scan them through 70 pages a minute straight up onto the screen. We can make use of your existing photo copiers as a scanning device. This is a nice ergonomic unit, however, for the person opening the mail, so they can scan and capture. There are many ways of scanning documents. One way is to right-click on our document from scanner, so, if you opened the mail as a batch of filing it would ask you who’s it from, what’s it about and where would you like to file it.

Importing Documents

Now I’m not going to do batch scanning, but I am going to do batch importing which is effectively the same thing. I’ve put together some example documents that we’re going to file as a batch. The first document is opened on the right-hand side showing a preview of what we’re filing. We fill out our usual method data fields just like we had previously and the documents name that you already have in your folder is maintained. When I hit create on the first document, if you look over on the left, you will see the first ones added to the system and the next ones opened. Its name is maintained. Its preview is shown on the right but, of course, the whole point of your folders today is they’re groups of documents. We know this is the correspondence folder for this contact. Why don’t we say create all and when we do that each of the documents are added to the system. The original file format is maintained, your original naming conventions and document dates are maintained. Now you can also search for any of the keywords off the document as well as via any of the metadata. It takes around 10 seconds to capture a folder and if you look at how many folders and subfolders you have, you’ll be able to very quickly capture that information.

Link to Existing Folders

What if we could simply map back to your existing network drives? What if you had a Z drive and that was where all your folders and subfolders currently reside. We can map back to that. We call that a traditional folder. This is your Z drive with all your folders, subfolders and a document sitting there as they look today. That can be all made available from day one.

Retrieval

That’s the first part of a system, which is capture, the input process should be quicker and easier than what you’re doing now. Where the real benefits come, is in the retrieval side and this is where we start to see the greatest benefits. If you wanted to know what time the sunset was tonight in your location, in Google you’d put in the word sunset, your location and you get yourself an instant answer. You don’t need to know that that information came from a spreadsheet 20 folders deep on a server in Darwin. You really want just one answer and that’s the beauty of Google, it knows how to find what it is you want. Wouldn’t it be nice if your entire office filing system worked the same way? That is the way it pretty much works. I’m going to do a vague search just for one word across the entire office and I get an instant answer. I get documents totalling 28. It shows me where that word appears in the name. It shows me where it appears multiple times throughout the metadata and it even shows me for each of the instances throughout. Twenty-eight is too many, so I remembered it had something to do with Bloggs and an it was an invoice. I’ll narrow it down and I get three documents. It shows me where both words appear in the name, the metadata and throughout our document. 99 times out of 100, you know who you’re talking to, you know what you’re looking for and you drill it down to one onto the documents. What this means, is for the fifty to a hundred bits and pieces of information that we all look up each day, we can now find it in seconds instead of minutes. What that really means, is no more telephone tagging. You get to go to lunch on time.

Customised Searching Shortcuts

Depending on where you’re sitting within the business, you’re going to want things very different ways. If you were in a management role, a general admin role, an accounts area, you’re going to want things very differently. Instead of trying to squeeze all staff into one filing system, which, as we know doesn’t really work, and we all go off and do our own thing, what if we could now have one filing system but set up for each of you as an individual, as if the entire business revolved around your roles. We do that by creating searches for you that will be customized for each user. These are generic ones across the whole company here, but let’s look at a few examples. If you were managing Jobs and you wanted to look at all our Job Files, we can go into the Job for Bloggs and there are all the folders and subfolders. You may want to look at it from a Client point of view, and if we click on Bloggs our Client, I can see that they are Manufacturers. They have addresses, phone numbers, contact details. This is customer relationship or CRM information that’s no doubt available in your Client tracking databases that you already have. Wouldn’t it be nice if their mobile number appeared here as well so we’re not having to go back to a different system to find it when we need to call them. Perhaps you’d like to look at it from a HR point of view. If I look at our employee Angela, I can see she has an employee contract, employee documents and a performance review. If we go into her performance review it’s automatically named as to what it is, who it was for, when it was done. We get a preview of that on the right-hand side. Maybe you’d like to look at things from an Asset Register point of view. I can see that this PC, who we bought it from, how much it was, serial numbers, whose desk it’s on, and even things like warranty expiration dates can be listed. Maybe from an accounts point of view, perhaps you’d like to look at all Supplier invoices that have been entered, ready for payment this week. There are three. If we click on one of those, we get invoice numbers, accounting codes, whose desk it is on to process. One of my favourite ones that I use all day every day, is recently accessed by me.

I’m always going back to things that I’ve recently worked on and one of those things is our report that we created earlier.

Processing Documents

Annotations

Now that we found the information, what do you do with it. If I had emailed this report to you and Michelle, you would make some changes and you’d send it back to me. I’ve somehow got to collate it and bring all that together. What if you guys could mark it up on the fly? What if you could highlight sections using different pens. We could scrub out parts. You might draw arrows on it. Perhaps you put a post-it note on it that doesn’t fall off. We’re annotating over the top of the document not on the original. You can print it with or without the notes. I’ve got customized rubber stamps saying this one’s approved for payment. I can even stamp it with a signature that’s only available on my machine, so I can sign off on documents and processes as we go. This is annotations floating over the top of the document. We haven’t changed the original.

Real Version Control

If you wanted to change the original, we have a simple checkout process. Whilst this is checked out to me, only I can change it. Everybody else can still view it, but only I can make changes. I’ve decided to change the colour. I’m finished with my changes, so I check it back into the system, so everybody else can use it again if they wish. When we click on our report we can now see that it’s red. I also note now, that is version two and I think, well that’s interesting, how did that come about? I can ask for the documents history, and I can see version one and two. I can see they were created 11 minutes apart by the same user. In your case of course, it might be weeks apart, by different Staff Members. We’ll use this one as an example. I’d like to look at our current version, so we open that one up in Word. We can see our version, but M-Files have said, wouldn’t it be nice if you could see the history of this document using the compare feature? I can open the original and the current at the same time. The original is opened on top, current is on the bottom and you can see the differences between those documents. Well, I think version 2 is awful. I want to go back to version 1, so I close that down, click on the version that I like, and I can roll back to the earlier version. It says yes, and it creates version 3 one minute later, back to back. Instant and easy version control, that cannot be circumvented by staff.

Distributing Documents

Now that we’ve worked on a document, you often want to send it to somebody. A common feature in any program is to right-click and send as a copy by email. M-Files attaches it as it is a Word document and you can simply hit Send. However, you don’t want to send things out as an editable Word document, you want to send it out as a PDF. In your world, you open it in Word, save it as a PDF on the desktop, attach it, send it, delete it from the desktop. That’s way too hard. We know you want to do those things, so we give you the ability to send as PDF by email. M-Files opens it, converts it to a PDF and attaches it. You can hit Send. You’ll see niceties like that throughout the whole M-Files experience. Just simple day-to-day tasks made easier. When you send this report off to your Client, shouldn’t you be filing that? Isn’t that a business transaction? We can do that in one go with our unique button, send and save to M-Files. It’ll do both at the same time.

The Power of Metadata and its Benefits

That’s the first two parts of the system, filing and finding of documents using metadata. That within itself should be a brilliant productivity result. Having what you need, the moment you need it, every single time, you can spend more of your day doing the important work and less tearing your hair out trying to find things. In the third and last part of the process, we’re going to look at how this can all come together. What if we can apply this theory of metadata to other things within the business? What if you could have metadata around Clients, contacts, Suppliers, Staff Members? We will then start to see that all your information, as well as all your knowledge, can be brought together. Information being Word documents, emails, reports and knowledge being phone numbers, contact details, status of Jobs, due dates, are all brought together. The best way to start to show you the third and last part of the process is where, first, going to do a search for all staff. We do a search for all employees. There’s 13 of us and if you click on me as an example it has metadata around me the employee. It says, that I’m a director, I’m a Job manager, an account manager. I have multiple roles. I have addresses, phone numbers, contact details, emergency contact numbers etc. This is metadata for me the employee. Throughout M-Files, you’ll see these little arrows, where everything is related to everything else. Under me I’m working on eight Jobs. I have six employees in my team. I have nine outstanding assignments to do. Let’s go down further. One of the Jobs that I’m working on, was that financial report. Who is the Client that is for and that’s Bloggs Pty Ltd. When I click on their card, I get all their CRM information. Again, this is all available in your other databases but it’s so nice to have it all linked in here automatically. As well for this Job, wasn’t there documents associated with it? One of those documents was our report. Because we’re clicking on a document, we’re getting our documents preview, and we’re back to our documents metadata. What is linked to our document as well, as it turns out, is an annotation, an entity, a Job, a contact. If we were to go into just Bloggs as a contact and look at their documents, we’re back to our report. Wherever you are within the M-Files system, whether you’re within a Job, Client, contact, Supplier, Staff Member, everything is related back to everything else.

Managing Assignments, Task, Approvals

Where that becomes particularly useful, is in a simple day-to-day example. If I asked you to call Bloggs regarding that report, how do I get your attention? Do I send you a long email you don’t understand? Do I come and interrupt? Even if you’ve been notified, how do I know you’ve done it? Do I have to follow up with you tomorrow? That takes up your time and my time. Instead of having unmanaged plastic in trays, we have replaced them with managed electronic in trays. Simple Jobs are now called assignments. My assignment for you is to call Bloggs, simple stuff. I’m going to give you a bit more information, so you know what to do. I’m going to add it to the Clients file, so I’ve got a permanent record that I’ve requested this of you. The deadline I’m giving you though is today, so it’s a short deadline to get this one completed. As I’m set up in the system, I’m going to assign it to myself. I’ll receive an email notification telling me that I have a new assignment to do. We have a new assignment. Let’s say we have notified you to do this work, how do you go about doing it? First, where’s the phone number for Bloggs? Is that in your Client database? Is that in Outlook? Is it on a business card? Once you’ve got the phone number, where’s the report? Is that the report that you sent them? Is it the one that they edited and sent back to Michele? How do you know you’re on the right version? You can pick up the phone instantly with M-Files. If I asked you to give Bloggs a call, you say, great, what’s their phone number and there it is at the bottom. Bloggs picks up the and you can say you have got it on the screen, what would you like to know? What a result. How many times a day do we need a document and a phone number, an email and the attached invoice, a Job and its approval status. Most of what we’re doing is today’s information and knowledge and this brings the two together.

Notifications

How did we notify you? We found the best place to do that is in Outlook, because we send and receive emails all day every day. We get email notification and it says it’s called Bloggs. We read the report that’s fine, deadlines today. I better get on with it now. Instead of going off in all those different areas you can click on it directly from your notification. It takes you straight to your assignment in M-Files. Not only do we have the phone number or other contact details available to us at the bottom. Not only do we have the document open on the right-hand side, so you can answer their immediate inquiry, you’ve got the rest of their file open as well in case they ask you something obscure. This will be in your in-tray forever, until you mark it as completed. To do so, you pop a tick next to your name, you hit save and we get a green tick on our clipboard.

How to Manage Workloads

However, as your boss, I might say, show me all assignments for yourself and there are 15. Some I see are completed and some are outstanding. I can see where you’re up to. If I see that you’ve got too much work to do or too little work, I can micromanage in-trays to ensure that nothing gets missed. I don’t have to come and see you every day and ask you about all these 15 different Jobs to see where they’re up to. I can discreetly have a look and then come and see you if there’s any problems.

Managing Workflows

There are simple day-to-day assignments which is great, but a lot of what we’re doing of course, is more complicated. Workflows, one of the last things I wanted to talk to you about, is a workflow. You’ll see all these features and functionality coming together. We’re going to build a new document, but instead of building a document from scratch, under Client files, they have requested a quote for services. Of course, it launches our quoting template. We fill out our usual metadata fields like we had previously. It will set up automatic naming. We hit create, and our quoting template is launched, which is in Word and again I’ve asked M-Files to fill out the bulk of these fields for me. The quote for services is $3000, and as quick and as easy as that you’ve finished your quote. We save this into M-Files and like any other document it has been automatic named. We have a preview of it on the right-hand side and we have our usual metadata at the bottom. Now we also have this workflow area. This workflow is a Client quote approval workflow. There will be dozens of different workflows built and created for you. This one’s been automatically assigned to me and I’ve received email notification. My deadline is 24 hours and my Job is the quote is to be approved before sending. I’m looking at it, do I approve this, yes or no? At this stage, I’m given two options in the workflow. I can either say Client quote to be amended please see comments, and it goes back to your desk, or I can move it on saying it has been approved and I’m happy with it. I’m going to approve it. When I click OK, if you look at who it’s assigned to, whose desk it’s on, it goes off my desk and it goes on Karen’s desk. Karen gets notified via email. Her Job is, as the quote has been approved, it is ready to be sent to the Client, so Karen does her Job saying quote sent to Client. She might say emailed today. When Karen clicks ok, it goes off her desk. It’s on nobody’s desk, it’s been completed. It’s a very simple workflow but it gives you the idea, that information can go through from person to person. Each one of you does a certain Job or action, then it goes on to the next person. 24 hours before my deadline, I can be sent a reminder. 24 hours after I miss my deadline, you get notified. We can put all sorts of rules around these workflows. They can be very simple as demonstrated or be more complex and go in a series of different directions, depending on what it is you need. You get these nice graphical overviews. We will help you to build, maintain, and manage those workflows. Once they’re up and running, they are very straightforward.

Mobile/Tablet/Web Access

The last thing I wanted to show you is being able to access the entire solution from any mobile device. We’ve become a more and more mobile workforce. What if we could access your entire filing system, as well as phone numbers and contact details from any iPhone, Tablet, PC, iPad or a web browser. I can’t show you my mobile phone, but I can play for your one-minute video which I’ll do now. M-Files mobile access puts the information important to your business right at your fingertips. No matter where you are, view documents on the go, like that purchase invoice that just came in. Check it out, make sure everything is correct and approve it. Gregg an accounting gets emailed automatically. You can pull the invoice up on his laptop and send the payment. It’s seamless, mobile and available for download now. It’s just one of the ways you can experience the magic of M-Files. From that you can see that it brings it all together. All your information, all your knowledge, available to you from wherever you are.

Customisation/Implementation/Training

The important thing, we have found with the whole solution though, is implementation. We’ve been doing this for over 20 years. The most critical part, is ensuring that you partner with an organization that will deliver these results for you from day one. We do this in many ways. The staff with multiple opinions, need one filing system, one method. The best way we go to achieving that first, is we create a manual specifically for your company. We document what it is you do, how do you process the mail, emails, invoices, reports. Whatever it is you do, we will custom build this document around your company, department by department. If we click on how we process the mail, this of course is an example, but if it was incoming and they are general documents, then, admin to sort scan and file. I’ve forgotten how to file so I click on the word in blue and up come the filing instructions. Written instructions, in English by our trainer, not IT talk. These screenshots are a copy of your M file system. It’s not a generic example. If you have someone start new, read this. This is how we operate. We then take it further. Where we make fields compulsory, with these stars. Where you can say who it’s from, what it’s about, when it came in, or the system won’t let you file it. You get to set as many or as few rules around the system to ensure it’s captured a certain number of ways. We will then provide extensive implementation and training. We’re typically trained two people as M file system administrators, who will build and develop the system. You’ll set up procedures, processes, passwords. You’ll own it as a process, in-house. The ongoing maintenance of the system is maybe five minutes a month once it’s up and running. You simply make use of it. We will then train the balance of the staff in small classes of up to three people for four hours. We are training you processing your documents, through your scanners, based on your procedures and process manual on your computers. You’ll be at an expert level. We’ll have everybody trained, in back-to-back training sessions. You go live immediately, and you’re guaranteed to get your results. There you go, that’s an overview of the M-Files system. We always like to show people what’s possible. you may find that there are features there that you don’t necessarily need to employ. We also have a pre-configured version if budget constraints are a big issue for people. However, almost all our Clients find return on investment in two to three months. it’s a system that quite literally pays for itself.

Download a Trial/Quote

From our web page, on our home page, there is an instant trial that you can download. If you wish, there’s also a button to click there for an instant quote. If you’d like an indication of costs, please feel free to call us at any stage and we look forward to working with you on this project.

Our Document Management System is trusted by our clients

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Testimonial by  from
Sean Sandford Mortons - Urban Solutions

During our recent QA Certification and Accreditation process it became very clear that the power of M-Files could provide us with the ability to ensure that all documentation both leaving from and arriving into the office could be controlled in such a way to enable the document retrieval for Quality auditing extremely streamlined and efficient.

Furthermore the control of our QA Documents through M-Files has enabled us to manage and control system documentation in a way that provides users with the necessary access while tracking changes and being able to easily input the relevant details into the appropriate forms, checklists and reports. M-Files has enabled us to better control the system documents needed for audit control, monitoring and storage, improving the way we are able to operate the QA System.

Finally, through the workflow process within M-Files we have been able to assign tasks and function to staff members required by our QA procedures which ensure that the necessary documentation is being undertaken for the ongoing implementation of our QA procedures.

Karen and her team have provided excellent support and worked with us through the whole QA implementation process.

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