Going Paperless Enables CPA Firm to Strike a Blow Against it's Number One Enemy - Wasting Time

WELLINGTON, KS, November, 2005 ---The firm of Kenneth L. Cooper Jr., CPA, converted from paper to digital document management two years ago for a very fundamental reason—to be a better business. 

“It gives us significantly more control over our most perishable commodity—time,” says the firm’s founder, Kenneth L. “Lonnie” Cooper, Jr.  “As a result, we get more done per hour, which is the number one goal of virtually every accounting firm.

“In addition, customers and referral sources see us as a business that is willing to invest to improve our ability to serve them.  This hits home every time we are able to find a file for a customer in seconds or email a file to a law firm or bank.”

In Cooper’s opinion, the firm’s Laserfiche- based digital document management system is now as important to its success as its accounting, payroll, tax and timekeeping applications.  “Laserfiche is fully integrated into our daily procedures to the point that it is running and in use all day on every person's PC,” he says.  “Laserfiche has had as much effect on the way we operate as Lotus 123 did 20 years ago.  It represents the same evolutionary jump in the way we do our work.  We could not go back to paper files any more than we could do without spreadsheet software.”

On the advice of Milton Konstantinidis of Galaxie Business Equipment, a Laserfiche Value Added Reseller based in Winfield, KS, Cooper stations scanners on every desktop, including his own, so that digitizing and indexing the files gets done quickly as part of everyone’s routine.  Once a day, Cooper runs Quick Fields, a Laserfiche-developed batch processing program that distributes files to the proper customer folders automatically. 

“Quick Fields eliminates the potential for errors and speeds up the process considerably, especially during tax season when we may be processing as many as 100 files a day,” says Cooper. 

Though he is an ardent proponent of digital document management now, Cooper hesitated for several years before deciding to make the switch two years ago.  “I worried that it wouldn't improve productivity because it might take so much time to put things into the system,” he says.  “As it turns out, I’m pretty sure that we could prove that we have increased productivity—if we had time to measure it.  The real benefit, however, is that it makes us a better business, capable of serving our customers more effectively and better equipped to grow rapidly if we want.”

Founded 13 years ago, Kenneth L. Cooper Jr., CPA, serves more than 800 customers in the Wellington area.  A city of 8,000, Wellington is the county seat of Sumner County, the leading wheat producing county in Kansas.  The local economy also features a range of modest-sized industrial companies, most of them suppliers to aircraft companies based in nearby Wichita.

About Laserfiche

Based in Long Beach, Calif., Laserfiche (www.laserfiche.com) creates simple and elegant document management solutions that help organizations run smarter. Laserfiche solutions are used in more than 21,000 government and business offices worldwide.