Efficiency, Efficiency, Efficiency…
The Doc.It Archive is our electronic version of the accountant’s paper file room. All finalized engagements and documents are “published” in PDF format to the Doc.It Archive and stored within a secure, standardized client folder structure that you define. Documents are easily retrieved in a few seconds by browsing the appropriate client folder, the same way that accountants have done for years. Excellent “librarianship” of all documents within the folder structure is maintained with our Policy Manager, also unique to Doc.It Suite®. The Policy Manager guarantees uniform naming conventions, retention period, and folder location for each document. The Doc.It Archive is one of the key aspects of Doc.It Suite® that provides a level of efficiency that cannot be achieved by products that rely solely on a hit-and-miss search mechanism for all document retrieval. However, Doc.It Suite® does include a powerful content search engine that would be used mostly for research projects or to find misfiled documents.

Virtually every other document management system stores most of its documents in their native format. The original application will be required to open these documents and may also require expensive program licenses. In some cases, an older document may not open in the current version of the application. The Doc.It Archive does not rely on any other applications to open its documents, which are all in the timeless PDF format. Our built-in PDF Previewer allows documents to be quickly viewed with a single click. There are no time-consuming and repetitive “open” and “close” operations, as are required by other systems to open the selected documents.

To maintain excellent librarianship, a Doc.It Policy is applied to ensure consistent naming, retention and storage for all document types.

Only Doc.It provides a set of fully automated publishing tools to be able to “publish” all documents and engagements into the Doc.It Archive. The Doc.It Publisher creates a single, fully indexed and bookmarked PDF for each finalized engagement, and supports Doc.It WIP Binders, Caseware Working Papers, and CCH FxEngagement Manager. The resulting “published” PDF is then stored in the Doc.It Archive for the appropriate retention period, as determined by the Doc.It Policy Manager. This sole PDF represents the “opinion” of the engagement. Our best practice recommends that the engagement files from Doc.It, CaseWare and CCH Engagement can now be deleted from the network storage two years after finalization. The Archive version is all that will be required.

There are those that might argue that publishing is an unnecessary step and that the engagement can be retained in the engagement management software for its lifecycle. We would suggest that engagement management software lacks adequate security, retention management and search-ability, the three hallmarks of a true document management system. However, of greater importance is how inefficient it is to retrieve documents from an engagement that may have been locked down, is compressed or requires a few minutes to be checked out from its central store. In an independent survey, our Doc.It customers have told us that fast document retrieval is by far the most important aspect of any document management system and that the Doc.It Archive alone can easily justify the investment.

Doc.It WIP Binders organize all of your work-in-process engagement documents into single, secure electronic binders for efficient processing and collaboration. When completed, all or part of the engagement can be published to the Doc.It Archive for long-term retention as a single, fully bookmarked and indexed PDF. The feature set is complete and includes:

Our Doc.It PDF Editor eliminates the need for expensive Adobe Acrobat licenses. Our powerful PDF viewing and editing technology is designed specifically for the accounting industry and includes all of the features that are important in an accounting office:

Doc.It Suite® includes complete Scan and OCR support for all types of scanners, including network-attached scanners and Fujitsu Scan Snap scanners. Auto-rotation and de-skewing features result in more accurate scanned documents.

Doc.It Advanced Forms Recognition technology can recognize, name and organize an unlimited number of document formats like tax slips, invoices or any other form type. In addition, a powerful feature set for efficient personal tax processing and review is built into Doc.It Suite®.

Doc.It Product Specifications - Workflow PDF

A well-designed workflow system is the next logical step in improving efficiency and staff utilization within an accounting firm. Doc.It Suite® includes the industry’s most powerful workflow management system. Most workflow systems provide effective tracking of project tasks, but only Doc.It WorkFlow with Smart Scheduler can “intelligently” assign tasks to the most appropriate staff person. The Smart Scheduler uses a rules-based system that employs the same criteria that a management person would use in selecting staff. These criteria include the required skill, internal billing rate, availability, whether the staff member has worked on this client in the past, etc. The Smart Scheduler also uses load-balancing in assigning work, a function that would be very difficult for an individual to perform. Load-balancing will insure that all staff are properly utilized, resulting in an improved bottom line for the firm.

Also included with Doc.It WorkFlow are:

Doc.It Product Specifications - Portal PDF

The newest approach to sharing sensitive information is to post customer files on a website where customers can access information 24/7. The distinct advantage of the web portal over email is that the file transfer is over a secure connection and very large files can be transferred. Features of the Doc.It portal include: