T3 briefing: Document Management should be a bigger priority for improving adivser efficiency

Adviser Sheila D. Miller made a sage comment as we were parting company following the CEO Image-hosted briefing on document management technology: “You are getting married when you decide [on a document management system],” she paused briefly, “and there are no prenups,” she said with a chuckle. In our brief chat I asked her if she had been using anything for her firm in the document imaging and management space. She said no, that her firm remained a paper shop and that she was attending this conference to help in making a long-term decision. “When I select something that’s going to be it so I really want to do my due diligence and get the right fit from the beginning,” she said. And she came a fair distance to do it. Her firm, Outlook Financial Services is based in Anchorage, Alaska.

I was attending the CEO Image Systems briefing largely because of feedback I’d received from several advisers following my recent columns on document management and scanners. They thanked me for the stories but gently recommended I take a look at the offerings from CEO Image Systems, a company I hadn’t covered, more for space limitations (there are lots of vendors in the space) and what I thought was a fairly small (but vocal as it turns out) following among advisers based on the latest Financial Planning annual software survey.

The presentation this morning was made by company head Conrad Foster who was very careful to keep it at a mostly high-level overview of what advisers need to consider in deciding to bring document management and electronic content management systems into their practices.

He brought home several interesting points. First that some 70% of advisers still don’t use document management and even those that are scanning continue to basically just save the documents scanned into Adobe PDF format and organize those docs manually using Microsoft Windows Explorer. Not surprisingly, when he asked the audience what they were doing two thirds of the 20 or so present were doing just that.

One great point made by both Mr. Conrad as well as a user in attendance, Bill Sowell of Sowell Management Services, was that the search and retrieval benefits of no matter whose solution you used could not be overstated. Yes, advisers need to make sure they are compliant and archiving their data, but just being able to find relevant documents in their day-to-day work with a simple electronic search is a huge boost to efficiency.

There was a lot of discussion over what advisers need to expect when it comes to adhering to Rule 17a-4 and that these things needed to weigh heavily on whatever decision an adviser makes in terms of product selection. Again Mr. Conrad queried the room, this time to find out how many advisers had yet to be audited and only one hand was raised. Clearly advisers need to do their homework. Mr. Sowell chimed in again to make the point that in his last audit the investigators needed only a couple of days as opposed to the week or longer the time before when he had no document management software.

For more information visit CEO Image Systems Executive Assistant website.