Helping to get money to students faster

“In the past, it would take us at least six weeks to process a student’s paperwork. Now, thanks to Workflow, we can process the documents in two weeks,” says Jeramy Berry, IT staffer at the University of Utah’s Department of Financial Aid and Scholarships.

Students at the University of Utah, a major research institution with an enrollment of nearly 30,000, submit documents such as aid applications, scholarship acceptance letters, promissory notes, and copies of birth certificates, passports, and tax returns. Before Laserfiche was installed, some staff members sorted the documents into piles, and then sorted those piles into smaller piles before filing them. Meanwhile, financial aid counselors retrieved the documents and put them into more piles.

“Because documents could be at any point in this process, they were difficult to find, which often gave the impression they’d been lost,” Berry explains. “We’d ask students to stop by our office to fill out incomplete paperwork, but when they’d come in, they’d have to wait while staff went to look for the documents we’d contacted them about.”

Now, with Laserfiche, staff can track documents throughout the process. When the department receives a document, they scan it into the Laserfiche repository. They then enter key metadata, including the student’s name and identification number. Finally, they fill out a Status field to identify where the document is in their process and use Laserfiche Workflow™ to automatically route it to and from financial aid counselors and other staff.

The document is then stored in the Laserfiche repository, where staff can locate it using the student’s name, ID number, social security number or other search criteria. Even though the department has over a million documents in its repository, searches take only seconds.