More cities continue switching to paperless document management
Across the country, more municipal governments are coming around to the idea of operating with paperless processes, and relying instead on document management services. Increasingly, these cities and towns come to understand both the financial and procedural benefits going paperless provides.
The city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, recently completed the vast majority of its efforts to transition to new hardware and software platforms that allow for easier document management and robotics process automation on multiple fronts, according to Lancaster Online. This will allow the city to keep better tabs on data it collects over time, and improves the ease with which various municipal departments can share that data when needed.
A closer look
The transition actually began in 2014 but is now almost entirely up and running, with new systems in place for both resident-facing issues – such as real estate tax billing and payment processing – and back-end use by city employees, the report said. The hope is that the new platforms will push residents to be more active in paying their bills online, to further reduce city expenses for paper, printing, postage and so on.
Right now only about 35-40 percent of bills are paid online, and the city sends bills to every resident regardless of whether they take advantage of online payments, the report said. Soon, they will have the option to go all-paperless.
A different kind of effort
Meanwhile, in nearby Upstate New York, the Jasper County Commissioners office recently signed off on an effort to shift the County Recorder's office to a paperless document management system, according to the Rensselaer Republican. The plan would be to scan every document on file, regardless of age – as many of them predate digital scanning by decades or even centuries – and protect them for the long-term. The office would also undertake scanning efforts for all documents it receives in the future.
Other efforts to scan vital historical county documents could likewise get underway in the near future, the report said.
In general, the more cities, towns and counties can do to make sure they're relying on paperless processes and document scanning, the more secure and easily shareable vital information becomes.
