Forms are necessary and used by every type of business, with rigorous focus in regulated industries such as financial services and health care. The true cost of paper forms is often not calculated in Storage Costs, Business Process Efficiency, or Disaster Recovery. That is why businesses have moved into virtual data rooms such as Firmex, to keep all their documents in one place.

According to the American Records Management Association (ARMA) and IDC:

• 7.4% of staff time is spent searching for documents
• Companies spend 280 hours annually per employee looking for lost documents
• Storage Costs per page=$0.14=$1,400 per file cabinet
• Due to a lack of Disaster Recovery Planning-70% of companies NEVER Fully Recover from a Disaster

The expense of this Paper Form plague is enough to make any CFO cringe, but the horror is easily compounded when a form fails to get routed to the right individual for approval or denial. What day was this form routed to the CEO? and at what time? Then, the Form Fatale, the inability to locate the form during an audit, or perhaps a visit from your friendly regulator.

Expediting the routing of a form should be straightforward, and in the mortgage lending space there was plenty of time to get the required forms before or during closing on a residence. There is a bit of a change happening this month, as the new mortgage rules to protect the customer take effect. Any measures that protect customers should be universally praised in the same way the bad credit mortgage market has been acclaimed. Closing documents are now going to be prepared by the Lender with a deadline of having Closing Disclosure Forms prepared 3 days before closing. Great for the buyer, but pity the poor Lenders who are now taking over the responsibility of drawing up the forms instead of the closing agent.

The Holy Grail of Forms

Imagine the possibility of a Form being generated in email, automatically being routed to the next person, and once all the workflow is completed the data is stored and archived on a SQL server and can then be exported to an Enterprise Application (ERP, SharePoint, etc.). Anyone authorized to search for data/metadata can use Outlook to perform the search into any ERP or SharePoint repository. Let’s not forget the ability to generate, customize, and access reports.

How would this type of solution benefit regulated industries, and those industries facing change such as the new regulations affecting the mortgage industry with expedited processing timeframes.

The Triumphant Victory

This reign of tyranny has now been halted, with the launch of FORMVERSE, an Enterprise software application that is installed at your site and leverages your existing Microsoft platform. The data may be encrypted and allows your staff to access the data, metadata, or reporting right from Outlook, or any mobile device.