Technical FAQs

Few industries have been impacted by the proliferation of digital technology than the financial services sector. In fact, it’s one of the few markets where the average consumer can easily observe how much has changed in a short amount of time. Many people haven’t even set foot inside a bank for years, and millions pay all of their bills exclusively online. According to the US Federal Reserve, personal checks declined from 58.8 percent of non-cash payments in 2000 to just 8.3 percent in 2018. Both of these trends are driven by the increased convenience of FinTech applications, and the same changes have impacted the lending industry, as well.

What Is FinTech Lending?

Since the 2008 financial crisis, a new breed of lenders has become a disruptive force in the banking sector. Unburdened by the cumbersome infrastructure that makes large financial institutions slow to adapt to change, FinTech lenders utilize the latest technology to deliver a more responsive, personalized, and transparent lending experience to consumers. These innovative startups have combined easy-to-access digital platforms with sophisticated data analytics to streamline the lending process and deliver funds to borrowers much faster than could be accomplished with traditional loans.

Borrowers, it seems, have been quick to embrace this alternative source of lending. From 2013 to 2018, FinTech companies increased their share of the personal loan market from a mere five percent to thirty-eight percent. That rapid growth is a result of increased penetration into the digital marketplace and more flexible credit scoring that allows FinTech lenders to assess risk and approve loans more effectively. 

In the early days of the industry, most FinTech lenders still relied upon traditional FICO credit scores when evaluating a borrower’s potential to repay loans. Over time, however, they have used a variety of alternative scoring mechanisms driven by data collection algorithms to create a more dynamic picture of a borrower’s credit status. Between 2007 and 2015, for instance, the correlation between FICO scores and the rating system used by one prominent peer-to-peer FinTech lender declined from 80 percent to just 35 percent.

The “Tech” Behind FinTech Lending

The loan adjustment algorithms working under the hood of FinTech lending applications are incredibly sophisticated, but they need good data for fast, accurate underwriting. While traditional lenders focus on predictable data points like income, debt payments, and assets, the digital nature of FinTech applications allows them to go much more granular. By gathering insights from other customer applications, internet searches, and even geolocation data, they can create a more complex profile of each customer, which then allows them to structure loans and other financial products that meet their specific needs while also protecting the lender to unnecessary risk.

This new approach to lending has helped FinTech applications to cut down the “time to yes” on credit decisions from the three to five weeks commonly seen from traditional banks to as little as five minutes. Even more critically, they can use digital funding to deliver cash to borrowers in less than 24 hours compared to the typical lender’s three month response time.

Improving “Time to Yes” on Credit Decisions

In addition to deploying more sophisticated risk adjustment algorithms to assess credit worthiness, there are some additional ways that FinTech lenders can continue to improve performance and efficiency.

Embrace Paperless Automation

The first and most obvious step they can take is by eliminating paper forms from the application process whenever possible. One of the reasons why banks and other financial services organizations move so slowly is due to the time it takes to fill out, fax, scan, and review physical documents. Not only are these forms inefficient, but they’re also prone to clerical errors when an applicant’s data needs to be transferred from the form into a database or application. By digitizing the application process wherever possible and automating data capture, FinTech lenders can significantly cut down on processing times and eliminate the human errors that so often create additional delays.

Increase Document Management Versatility

Shifting to an emphasis on digital documentation brings another complication along with it because there are a variety of file formats used throughout the financial industry. Some documents need to be in a specific format for compliance purposes, and if customers are submitting files through a FinTech lending platform, they could be using multiple different file types. 

In order to streamline processing, FinTech applications need to be able to easily convert a wide range of file types into a few key formats that work best with their processing workflows. That means FinTech developers will need to integrate powerful document conversion tools into their software to ensure that they can avoid any troublesome incompatibility issues during loan processing.

Enhance Data Capture Capabilities

Although FinTech lenders are developing incredible algorithms capable of analyzing massive amounts of data to shorten credit application times, they are still dependent upon the information made available to them. That means developers need to implement data capture tools that can pull key data from a variety of sources and compile it into an easily searchable format. 

Optical character recognition (OCR) engines can quickly extract information for any number of documents and images to create searchable files that FinTech software can quickly process as needed. For hand-printed documents scanned into digital format, intelligent character recognition (ICR) tools can be deployed just as effectively, allowing FinTech lenders to gather data from a wide variety of sources.

Expand FinTech Lending Capabilities with APIs and SDKs

One of the easiest ways for FinTech developers to quickly build lending-friendly features into their applications is to leverage API and SDK integrations. Rather than building new functionality from scratch, they can instead take advantage of existing, proven solutions to enhance their applications. This allows them to keep the focus on the core differentiators of their FinTech lending platform, allowing them to process and approve loans faster while minimizing potential risk.

Accusoft’s collection of API and SDK integrations provide powerful viewing and processing capabilities when it comes to FinTech workflows. Whether you need to convert multiple file types quickly, clean up document images, or perform OCR data capture, Accusoft has the solution to unlocking your FinTech lending application’s potential.

The COVID-19 crisis has permanently changed the way banks do business. While many financial firms were already shifting away from brick-and-mortar branches toward both mobile and digital alternatives, pervasive pandemic priorities required a rapid shift in physical presence — forcing companies to rapidly react with remote work alternatives.

Some — such as JPMorgan — were already prepping for potential shifts in early March, deploying a pilot project that saw 10% of its 125,000 employees working from home. Banks like BMO, meanwhile, have embraced the new normal. The company says that around 36,000 staff members may permanently split their time between home and corporate offices. 

While this focus on employee efficacy and engagement is critical, productive people aren’t the only element of remote work success. Security and speed are two of the qualities that consumers now expect across all key banking functions, and firms must prioritize digital processes that streamline these processes without compromising financial requirements. 

But what does this look like in practice? How do organizations handle document management, process automation, and employee collaboration at a distance — without breaking the bank?

Facing Financial Frustrations

When work-from-home went from “maybe” to mandate, Deutsche Bank found itself racing to keep up. With just a few thousand out of its 90,000-strong workforce already working remotely, the firm was under pressure to scale capabilities quickly — from reimbursing staff for device purchase to rolling out video conferencing tools for more than 50,000 employees in less than two weeks, the bank has been under pressure to deliver remote work processes that deliver both continuity and compliance.

With finance firms historically lagging on technology adoption, however, this presents a significant problem. While cloud-based communication and collaboration tools are now commonplace — and can be readily adapted to work-from-home environments — the tools and tech necessary to underpin key financial functions are often tied to in-house server stacks and legacy applications. 

This creates a digital disconnect. While staff may have access to corporate networks, many of the secure document management and financial processing solutions they need to complete day-to-day operations simply weren’t designed to operate at a distance. Security accounts for part of this separation — regulatory control is critical for banks to ensure client privacy — but many banks have also focused on familiarity over functionality, adopting a “good enough” approach to cumbersome, on-site applications. As a result, firms now face financial frustration across critical workflows, including:

• Consumer Vetting — How do banks effectively evaluate potential client credit histories and financial foundations to deliver tailored service recommendations at a distance? Insecure credit or personal data access could have significant regulatory and legal repercussions.
• Credit Approvals — Necessary credit checks require secure connections and the assurance that data won’t be subject to theft or man-in-the-middle attacks.
• Loan Applications — Bank staff must complete complex forms at a distance and firms must ensure work-from-home employees have the tools they need to handle multiple file formats.
• Account Management — Opening, closing, and modifying account information requires secure access and the ability to share key documents with specific data removed or redacted. Financial data shared outside secure workflows could result in compliance failures.

Solving for Scale

While many big banks are preparing partial return-to-work strategies or ramping up remote work solutions, smaller financial firms don’t have this luxury. The scale of large enterprises affords bigger budgets for IT management and deployment, giving them a deeper pool of resources to pull from when deciding how best to support staff and systems at a distance. From in-house IT teams capable of creating custom-built apps to legacy software solutions that can be updated to work with new collaboration tools, the scale of big banks offers a marked advantage.

For smaller financial firms with the bulk of their workforce already at home and a return to the office unlikely in the near future, fragmentation is the familiar framework. Many SMEs now use multiple document management applications to streamline key processes — but these apps don’t always work well together.

In the office, this doesn’t pose a significant problem — staff might lose time switching between software tools or moving data across digital divides — but at home, access and agility are both restricted. This becomes more complicated thanks to the rise of multi-cloud computing. While purpose-built cloud services empower small banks to keep pace with their enterprise counterparts, they introduce complexity as access points both multiply and diversify.

Driving Digital Dividends

To drive digital dividends at a distance, smaller banks are well-served by the implementation of advanced software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs). These tools make it possible to integrate advanced functionality into existing apps without compromising the security of critical banking data. To deliver remote work potential, firms need SDKs capable of:

• Collaboration — Integrate key collaboration functions including in-app document viewing to enhance data security, easy annotation and commenting options to ensure all staff are on the same page for multi-step application or approval processes, and burn-in redaction to enhance the protection of client or corporate data. 
• Conversion — As complex, compliance-heavy processes such as loan applications, credit evaluations, and financial investments move to remote, on-demand models, banks need no-touch data processing that makes it possible to view multiple file types — including familiar Word and Excel files along with more specialized image formats — and convert these files to PDF documents for easy search. 
• Capture — Automated data capture, field recognition, and forms processing not only reduce the amount of time staff spend creating new forms and completing current applications, they also reduce the risk of human error. Enable your team to take complete control of document management functions with powerful character recognition, scanned document cleanup, and form identification — all from within your own application.

The “new normal” for banking relies on digital services. Advanced SDKs and APIs make it possible for firms to succeed over both time and distance by delivering comprehensive collaboration, conversion, and data capture without breaking the bank.

Accusoft’s ImageGear is a powerful image processing SDK integration that allows software developers to give their applications the ability to open, convert, and transform multiple image file formats. Given the complexity of image processing tasks, turning to a comprehensive SDK can save significant time and headaches in the software development cycle. Rather than building image manipulation features from scratch or seeking out multiple open source solutions for every processing need, developers can use ImageGear to add image processing essentials and whatever capabilities they need to keep their project on schedule.

8 Essential ImageGear Features

ImageGear delivers several noteworthy capabilities that are worth highlighting for developers looking to add image processing features to their applications. Here are a few of the most essential:

1. General Use Tools

Although ImageGear delivers a wide range of advanced image processing capabilities, it also provides a variety of conventional tools for image modification. Developers often incorporate these features into their application’s viewing interface, which allows users to easily alter images as needed. Some of the more commonly used tools include:

• Image cropping 
• Image rotation and resizing
• Thumbnail creation
• Sharpening/smoothing filters
• Contrast adjustment/gamma correction
• Red eye removal

2. Region of Interest Selection

Using ImageGear’s region of interest (ROI) features, it’s possible to create a freely shaped image area that can be targeted for additional processing. The ROI can be an ellipse or polygon shape, or it can be drawn freehand. Marking a specified area creates a 1-bit mask image to indicate which pixels will be affected by image processing algorithms.

3. Erosion/Dilation

ImageGear deploys mathematical morphology operations to help clean up and enhance binary images. Erosion works by removing layers of pixels from the inner and outer boundaries of defined regions in the foreground. This causes the white pixels in the foreground to shrink, which has the effect of making the area darker. Dilation performs the opposite function, increasing the boundaries of those same pixels to make the image region lighter. These functions are typically deployed in combination to remove objects or smooth borders on black and white or grayscale images.

4. Edge Detection

A key image processing capability, edge detection is used in pattern recognition, image matching, and 3D vision applications to identify the boundaries of objects within images. This function is particularly useful for image segmentation and data extraction tasks.

5. Speckle Removal

Speckling is the distinctive “salt and pepper” noise commonly found in many scanned or low resolution images. ImageGear has two different ways of removing speckles from an image to reduce noise and improve the overall quality without blurring details.

• Despeckle Method: Removes color noise from a 1-bit image by finding the average color value within the ROI and replacing the other pixels in the speckle area with this value.
• GeomDespeckle Method: Uses the Crimmins complementary hulling algorithm, which sends the image through a geometric filter that reduces speckle noise without compromising the edges of the original image.

6. ImageClean

The ImageClean function is a multi-faceted cleanup tool that uses several classes to perform common image processing tasks. Some of those tasks include:

• Inverting white text or auto-inverting black text on a white background.
• Auto-orientation or auto-cropping of an image.
• Cleaning borders.
• Dotted or solid line removal.
• Punch hold removal.

7. Background Correction

ImageGear can identify the best-fit plane for an image and then adjust the image luminance tilt accordingly, either by increasing or decreasing the image plane. This method is particularly effective at correcting illumination gradients in low-quality digitized images.

8. Image Effects

As part of its image processing capabilities, ImageGear provides a wide array of image effects that can be used to transform or modify image files. Developers can easily integrate these tools into their application’s viewer to allow end users to easily alter images. Some of these image effects include:

• Aging Effect: This effect adjusts image saturation and contrast to make an image appear worn and old. Noise and random vertical lines are also added to enhance the effect.
• Boost Effect: Often used to make older or faded images look new and more vibrant, this effect increases saturation, brightness, and contrast.
• Drop Shadow: This method adds a drop shadow to an image, which is often useful for setting an image apart from a background when combining visual elements.
• Gaussian Blur: Typically used to smooth out composited images, this effect blurs pixels to soften images and make them appear slightly (or extremely) out of focus.
• High Density Range Effect: This effect increases the contrast of shadow, highlight, and midtone areas separately, which mimics the human eye’s ability to adjust to lighting conditions rather than applying a uniform contrast adjustment.
• Lens Flare Effect: Commonly used to make images appear more dramatic or realistic, this method simulates a bright light reflecting within the camera lens.
• Solarize Effect: This effect sets a light threshold and then inverts the colors of any pixels that exceed that value. When applied to an image, it mimics the look of photographic film that was exposed to too much light during development.
• Toy Camera Effect: Often used to liven up an image, this effect emulates the distortions and imperfections created by using a low-quality camera lens in poor shooting conditions. 
• Sketch Effect: By blending the original image with a texture image, this effect can make the image look like it was sketched with a pencil or charcoal.
• Artistic Effects: This feature includes a series of effects that make images look as if they were hand painted. Two of these methods, the Pointillist and Splatter methods, use randomly generated pixel elements that cause the resulting image to be different each time the method is applied.

Expand Your Image Processing Capabilities with ImageGear

The features listed above only scratch the surface of ImageGear’s capabilities. In addition to essential image processing tools, the SDK also allows developers to add document features like annotation, conversion, compression, and full-page optical character recognition (OCR). With support for dozens of file formats, ImageGear gives software teams the tools they need to expand their application’s capabilities without wasting months of valuable development time. To get a first-hand look at what ImageGear can do for your .NET application, download a trial today.

TAMPA, FL, UNITED STATES, August 19, 2021 — The Tampa Bay Software CEO Council, founded by Tampa Bay Tech, selected Tampa Bay Area non-profit Computer Mentors as the recipient of the group’s annual fundraising efforts. This month, they presented Computer Mentors founder and Executive Director Ralph Smith with a check for more than $10,000.

“Every year we look for a local charity to connect with and the work Computer Mentors is doing to promote tech with area kids completely aligns with our mission,” said Jack Berlin, CEO of Accusoft. “The work they’re doing to empower kids to pursue careers in tech is instrumental to the future of Tampa Bay as a growing tech hub.”

Computer Mentors works to build opportunity through expertise for the underserved youth of the community. By establishing and building upon a fundamental skillset covering programming, entrepreneurism, public speaking, and more; Computer Mentors gives its students the tools and talent they need to become savvy, self-starting achievers in a tech-centric world.

The Software CEO Council comprises the area’s premier businesses, executives, and entrepreneurs of Tampa Bay’s technology community. Its mission is to create the largest communal ecosystem for tech startups in the state of Florida and put Tampa Bay on the map as a beacon for innovation and success, to foster talent and fuel growth. Council companies include A-LIGN, Accusoft, AgileThought, Bond-Pro, CrossBorder Solutions, Digital Hands, Geographic Solutions, Haneke Design, MercuryWorks, Sourcetoad, Spirion and SunView Software.

https://www.tampasoftwareceos.com/

“Tampa Bay Tech’s Software CEO Council represents several of our area’s most innovative, growing companies, and we are honored to be the recipient of their generous gift to our kids,” said Smith. “Donations like this help fund much-needed programs to help level the playing field for our kids and develop the next generation of talent right here in Tampa Bay.”

About Tampa Bay Tech:

Tampa Bay Tech is a 501(c) 6 non-profit technology council that has been engaging and uniting the local technology community for 20 years. Through their membership and partnerships their mission is to build a radically connected, flourishing tech hub where opportunity is abundant for all. With over 125 companies representing thousands of tech employees – as well as thousands of students within the area’s colleges and universities – Tampa Bay Tech provides programming and initiatives to connect the community, provide development opportunities, and support Tampa Bay’s growing workforce.

Jill St Thomas
Tampa Bay Tech
jill@tampabay.tech

About Accusoft: 

Founded in 1991, Accusoft is a software development company specializing in content processing, conversion, and automation solutions. From out-of-the-box and configurable applications to APIs built for developers, Accusoft software enables users to solve their most complex workflow challenges and gain insights from content in any format, on any device. Backed by 40 patents, the company’s flagship products, including OnTask, PrizmDoc™ Viewer, and ImageGear, are designed to improve productivity, provide actionable data, and deliver results that matter. The Accusoft team is dedicated to continuous innovation through customer-centric product development, new version release, and a passion for understanding industry trends that drive consumer demand. Visit us at www.accusoft.com.

Accusoft has been remote since March 2020. The executive team is committed to ensuring the safety and well-being of its employees during this time. While these measures are necessary, they come with different challenges for team communication and bonding. Over the past seven months, Accusoft’s leaders have gotten creative, finding new, virtual ways for their teams to connect, not only about work but personally as well. Here are some of the unique ways Accusoft has kept its employees engaged, informed, and connected while operating remotely.

Company-Wide Town Hall & AccuTalk

Accusoft’s executive team hosts a company-wide, virtual town hall once a month to give updates on the company’s performance during COVID-19. Leaders share updates and answer questions about the state of business. The meeting helps provide clarity about what’s going on at Accusoft during the pandemic. It alleviates some of the uncertainty about how this situation is impacting normal business operations.

“We know it’s crucial to keep our employees informed about the business,” states Jack Berlin, CEO of Accusoft. “While it’s difficult to be out of the office, especially for me, I know it’s what’s best for our team. While we are remote, we need to ensure that employees are informed and understand how we are handling this situation from the top down.”

AccuTalk, formerly Chalk Talk, is held once a quarter on a virtual platform. This company-wide meeting highlights the accomplishments of each department and their goals moving forward. During AccuTalk, the leadership team shares information about the successes and challenges of the team’s quarter and what they can do to meet their new goals in the following quarter.

Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives

Accusoft is committed to upholding its core values, including diversity and inclusion. Over the past several months, there has been social unrest on important issues related to this core value. Accusoft recognizes how this has impacted its employees and aims to provide a safe space for individuals to share thoughts, ideas, and feelings around the subject in a productive way. Individual team members have contributed to the activism Slack channel, which discusses trending news stories, ways to be a better ally, and community events to get involved in. 

Team Celebrations and Gatherings

In addition to informational meetings and activism groups, team leads and managers have hosted team bonding events including everything from Zoom lunch celebrations for team member’s life events to virtual gaming parties. 

The PrizmDoc team has a monthly birthday happy hour and a weekly lunch meeting where they play GeoGuessr. The marketing team has even gathered for a socially distant happy hour in-person to support a team member’s family food stand. 

“It’s important that we get together in a safe environment to reconnect with each other. We can easily forget that the human on the other side of the screen, whether visible to us or not, is a colleague that we once interacted with closely in person,” says Christine Hairelson, VP of Employee Experience at Accusoft. “We are all facing different challenges during this pandemic, and it’s vital that we connect with each other on a personal level as well as a business one.”

Virtual Events and Holidays

In addition to the team-specific events, Accusoft’s Event Ninjas, a group of dedicated volunteers from all teams, has put together several virtual events for the company to participate in over the past seven months. The team has planned a trivia night, ice cream social, beer and cheese tasting, and a virtual Halloween party. The goal is to keep everyone connected and engaged. 

“While we may not be able to all gather together safely, we can still connect with each other and share milestones, celebrate holidays, and help each other through this challenging time,” states Megan Brooks, VP of Marketing.

Want to work for Accusoft? Explore all of our open job opportunities on the Careers page, and apply to join our team.

Spreadsheets remain a standard tool for many organizations, and despite increasing adoption across cell-based competitors such as Google Sheets, Excel still owns the market. As noted by research firm Robert Half, while the use of XLSX formats is on a slow decline, almost 70 percent of finance firms say Excel remains their spreadsheet software of choice.

Fundamentally, this comes down to familiarity; 62 percent of users surveyed find this common format easy to use, making it their go-to option when entering financial data or performing quick calculations. The only problem with this is that this spreadsheet tool introduces significant security issues. According to recent Cisco data, 38 percent of the most prevalent, malicious file extensions use Microsoft Office file formats — including Word, PowerPoint, and Excel — to compromise corporate networks.

Accusoft is now offering a more secure, web-based solution for spreadsheet needs. PrizmDoc Cells offers a web-based spreadsheet viewing and editing alternative that makes it possible for independent software vendors (ISVs) to easily incorporate XLSX functions into corporate applications without increasing security risk. Here’s how the newest part of the PrizmDoc Suite can help companies streamline processes while maintaining security.

Web-Based Spreadsheet Security

Common spreadsheet practices come with significant risk. As noted by ZDNet, for example, a new malware group is using the Excel file format that creates malicious spreadsheets that bypass security scanners and — thanks in large part to their format familiarity — are opened by end-users. This creates a self-sustaining problem. With single-source spreadsheets still the norm for many financial firms, attackers just need to spoof corporate email addresses and attach familiar XLSX files to compromise corporate networks.

For ISVs, this presents an opportunity. The market needs a secure way to view and edit spreadsheets in-browser and they need to be able to control the way the formulas are viewed and manipulated. By delivering browser-based spreadsheet viewers and editors within their own applications, ISVs can streamline their clients’ processes while maintaining security and controlling data sharing. PrizmDoc Cells integrates with ISV’s applications to enable easy spreadsheet viewing and editing functions. This integration allows administrators to lock down spreadsheet access by making them read-only or disallowing downloads, while also permitting protected sharing so that users can perform calculations without compromising the original source.

Value-Added Version Control

Collaboration is critical for effective spreadsheet use, especially among highly regulated industries like finance. From sharing key data around lending, credit, or investment applications to completing profit and loss calculations, spreadsheets remain a staple of efficient and effective financial transactions.

As with any industry, version control is a challenge for any third-party file collaboration. As noted by Beta News, the still-popular process of downloading spreadsheets to end-user devices comes with multiple versioning issues, including:

• Loss of Visibility — When files are downloaded onto end-user devices, information security teams naturally lose sight of how information is used, changed, or shared. Not only does this make it impossible to deliver consistent version control, but it puts organizations at risk of regulatory non-compliance.
• Data Discrepancies — Once data is downloaded, it is instantly out-of-date. Replicated across multiple users, this scenario creates substantial subsets of data that are all slightly different and require significant analytical effort to create some semblance of reliable version control.

When an ISV integrates PrizmDoc Cells within their application, the functionality reduces version control challenges by allowing spreadsheet owners to remove visibility into underlying logic, such as proprietary business formulas or calculations, as required. It also eliminates the need for client-side installs or downloads, which adds another level of security for comprehensive version control.

Reducing Human Error in Spreadsheets

Errors remain a common spreadsheet concern. As noted by Computer Weekly, “Several research studies have found that up to 70% of spreadsheets contain errors which would result in serious miscalculations.” This creates both productivity and security risks. If calculations create inaccurate outputs, organizations may find themselves struggling to find the source of equation issues or computation concerns. If the problem persists, staff may share the affected spreadsheet in hopes of quickly finding a resolution, in turn potentially exposing documents to increased risk.

PrizmDoc Cells solves this problem with browser-based spreadsheet viewing and editing functionalities. Files display as they would in native applications but can be embedded across any website, CMS, intranet, or portal, allowing staff to securely view and manipulate spreadsheets based on permissions. While it’s impossible to eliminate the potential for formula or format issues, it’s imperative to keep data safe in a secure environment, and sharing these spreadsheets securely makes finding and solving any error more efficient.

A Secure Browser-Based Spreadsheet & XLSX Integration

Excel-based spreadsheets cannot stand up to the security and data sharing needs that companies need to scale. When it comes to sharing sensitive data and manipulating formulas, there is both complexity and corporate risk. Without the right permissions and controls in place, data could easily be misrepresented, costing the company revenue.

With PrizmDoc Cells, ISVs can provide the capabilities end-users need for secure spreadsheet viewing and editing. With the ability to independently import, edit, and export XLSX files, securely embed spreadsheet data anywhere, reduce error rates with secure collaboration, and streamline version control, it’s worth opening the door to new spreadsheets capabilities. Discover the next generation of spreadsheet solutions. Try PrizmDoc Cells today.

So, thanks to a global pandemic, you’ve been forced into running your business remotely. Perhaps this is a scenario your company was prepared for. Far more likely, you’ve found yourself scrambling to move to a 100% remote workforce with little time to prepare. The good news is: no matter where you find yourself on the preparedness scale, it’s not too late to set your business up for success.

There’s a popular Chinese proverb that says: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” Basically, if you want success and growth in the future, the time to prepare your business for remote work is now, rather than wasting time wishing you’d taken action earlier.

So, where does one begin when remote work has been so suddenly forced upon you? Certainly, there are dozens of issues to consider when it comes to optimizing a remote workforce — too many for us to adequately address here. So, for now,  we’ll stick with what we know best — how to manage your documents and forms.

Why Automation and Digitization Is Critical

To begin with, if you’ve been operating with paper-based processes — entering data manually on forms, distributing and filing paper-based documents, or collecting in-person signatures — those days are over…at least for awhile. So, if automating and digitizing your paper-based processes was on your “nice to have” priority list, it’s probably time to move it into the “must-have” category, pronto.

When it comes to managing a remote workforce, there’s also the tiny issue of security. Simply put, digital files are generally easier to secure than paper documents. This is especially important when your employees are working from home, where you have less control over who has access to those documents. 

Scanning and sending documents via email also poses a potential security risk if the documents are lost or stolen in cyberspace. Not to mention the fact that your employees’ inboxes are likely flooded with messages, making it hard to keep track of and manage those documents effectively. 

Many business leaders also feel that automating your documents, forms, and processes can help your business better weather the storms of an economic recession, including the one we appear to be entering now. According to  Forbes, 63 percent of business leaders say that automation tools will help safeguard operations against economic downturn.

Automation Offers Long-Term Benefits to Business

Even when you’re back in your office, there are probably many processes you can implement now that will help streamline your business for the future. According to TotalProSource, implementing a well rounded digital automation software solution can benefit your business long-term,  in many different ways, by enabling you to:

• Access and complete documents easily, from anywhere, whether using a mobile device on the road or working offline at home. 
• Collaborate with team members no matter where they’re located, and eliminate manual processes. 
• Collect information and signatures and put them to work on automated workflows.
• Integrate with systems you already use to get the most ROI.

Choosing the Right Digitizing and Automation Solution

When it comes to your business, we know that a document isn’t just a document and a form isn’t just a form — they’re both critical components of how your business operates. That’s why you must look for an automation solution that easily integrates with your existing systems to ensure you are getting the most productivity and ROI.  

In order to help your business succeed in this changing environment, you need a solution like Docubee, a process automation tool that simplifies the creation, routing, review, and approval of documents and forms. Not only will Docubee help optimize your business for a remote workforce, it will also help enhance your operations for the future by allowing you to:

• Digitize your forms and document in minutes to collect the right information the first time and put it to work.
• Route, revise, and approve documents with multiple collaborators.
• Empower employees to build their own configurable workflow solutions.
• Automate workflows that enable your team to work and collaborate more efficiently.
• Create workflows to meet your unique needs and integrate with your CRM and other favorite tools, using a configurable, no-code workflow designer that puts you in control of the process.

Ultimately, by automating and digitizing your forms and documents, you’re not only setting up your remote workforce for success now, you’re also preparing your business to avoid disruption in the future — anytime you, or any key team member is unable to make it to the office.