Like most people, until you’ve seen it for yourself, you think it’s a great idea – in theory.
Proclamations and do-gooder intents are simply that without full implementation.
That’s exactly what Felicia Blake thought. Having worked in Accounting for over a decade, she’s heard of other companies offering paperless solutions that never quite fully delivered. She admitted to being skeptical after working with several companies in the past. They claimed and even attempted integration, but, in the end, there was still paper. Maybe a little less paper, but still paper that had to be physically managed, secured, and stored.
Blake shares that her days before Mosaic consisted of “scanning and scanning and scanning and scanning.” Each invoice had to be scanned into the T-Drive. She felt like half of her day was spent standing at the copy machine scanning in invoices so that they could eventually be processed. The scanning was necessary to access the “paperless” system that the company was using. “Today I hardly scan anything,” she says.
Most people say they embrace change, but Blake’s team did experience some pushback at the beginning. A few senior managers were used to bringing their signed documents to her desk with their signatures for processing. They didn’t want to open the platform and apply their e-signature, but once they realized the DocStar platform was loaded onto their computers and they walked through the two-minute process, they were sold.
The secret that Blake keeps is that DocStar has streamlined her workday so much that it doesn’t feel like work. For instance, last week, her boss asked her for a report on one of their vendors from 2019 – Current 2020. In the past, Blake would create an Excel spreadsheet, pull the invoices from their files and begin month by month, transferring the information from the files to the spreadsheet. Then, after double-checking a few times, she could email her boss. With DocStar, she pulled up the business, accessed its information, pulled a report with the correct date parameters, hit enter, and DocStar did the rest. She says “Instead of scanning, scanning, scanning, I go click, click, click. I attached my custom report to an email, and done.”
Blake explains that this has freed up her day to concentrate on the big stuff like audits. She now has the time to prepare for the more important things that affect her company. “Now I pull up my dashboard every morning, and I know exactly where we stand with every vendor,” she says.
DocStar and the Pandemic
When Mosaic brought the DocStar system to Blake’s workplace, there was absolutely no way anyone could have known COVID-19 was on the horizon and the impact it would have on our lives and work.
Blake explains, “I was pregnant when my company considered DocStar. So, I call DocStar my second baby!” It’s one thing to sell us on the system, but another to overcome pushback. We were trained and educated on why and how this system was going to make our everyday lives easier. They listened to our pain points and then created and implemented a system customized with our needs in mind. Blake exclaims that “Our solution is completely ours.”
Her voice fills with emotion when she remembers that without DocStar in place, the change in the pandemic work environment would have presented challenges that would not have supported their team.
“Simply put, it would have been impossible for us to work from home. I would have had to enter the office every day because there are things about the traditional paper platform that you cannot do remotely.”
Blake went on to share that even simple things, such as receiving invoices in the mail, would have been difficult. Our team would have had to physically go into the office to retrieve invoices, scan them, and process them, putting everyone’s family at increased exposure during the pandemic.
According to Corp Magazine, a mere eighteen percent of companies consider themselves paperless, despite the given advances in technology today. Even though the cost of a ream of paper is cheaper than what it used to be, these savings are not translated across the board in managing the created document. Those costs include printer toners and maintenance, filing systems and, believe it or not, staples! These hidden costs can be as much as 31 times the paper’s cost with estimations at $8 billion that companies spend on paper management every year.
If you’re ready to take the paper out of your paperwork, give MOSAIC, the paperless process people, a call today.
