Laserfiche 8 Scanning and Document Management Solution Review
Overall Satisfaction with Laserfiche
I use Laserfiche 8.2.1.687 to scan everything that goes through the Finance Department for the City including: Accounts Payable invoices, mail, check stubs, deposits, receipts and reports; Accounts Receivable invoices, letters and reports; Purchase Orders and Requisitions; and the Finance Directors' financial reports and miscellaneous correspondence. It is being used by Department Heads and assistants to locate invoices or mail, and print or archive them. It solves an age-old problem with invoices or mail being lost or misplaced before payment to the vendor, when I scan them as mail, I can easily locate an invoice when a vendor calls asking why something has not been paid and forward it to the Department Head as a PDF or hardcopy. Our goal is to acquire the workflow module and have a paperless approval process throughout the City.
The scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) functions are accurate. I used to review every single scan to make sure that invoice and check numbers were captured accurately so they can be located when needed, but I no longer do that because I have confidence that Laserfiche has captured it correctly. We have stopped storing the actual paper check stubs and invoices in my office. They are immediately boxed and stored for a couple years because anything that the auditors require, I have been able to locate in Laserfiche and supply them in PDF format. My only complaint is that deskewing documents is not as good as Adobe Acrobat and needs improvement.
The scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) functions are accurate. I used to review every single scan to make sure that invoice and check numbers were captured accurately so they can be located when needed, but I no longer do that because I have confidence that Laserfiche has captured it correctly. We have stopped storing the actual paper check stubs and invoices in my office. They are immediately boxed and stored for a couple years because anything that the auditors require, I have been able to locate in Laserfiche and supply them in PDF format. My only complaint is that deskewing documents is not as good as Adobe Acrobat and needs improvement.
Pros
- Clean scanning at any resolution your scanner supports
- Accurate Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for locating scanned documents
- Supports storing and searching .PDF, .DOC or .XLSX documents
Cons
- Deskewing documents when they go through the scanner slightly crooked is not done or is so minimal you can't tell. So most of my scans are slightly crooked.
- The program is extremely sluggish if I add all the processes I want to occur during scanning -- like OCR. I have to do it as a separate process at the end of the day.
- It does not take advantage of dual (or more) processors and all the RAM I have. Memory runs out too quickly and slows scanning to a crawl when scanning very long double-sided documents.
- We have much better customer service because vendors can be paid much more quickly when I receive a statement and realize that an invoice has not been paid and pull it up quickly in Laserfiche and resend it to the Department Head.
- Eliminating storage in my office of all paper invoices and check stubs has saved a great deal of work filing and maintaining the file storage cabinets. Which has allowed me to have greater production on other items.
- Being able to locate a scan and e-mail it to Auditors, customers or Department Heads has saved a great deal of paper.
- Adobe Acrobat Capture
Laserfiche is much faster and the optical character recognition is more accurate than Adobe Acrobat Capture. It took approximately 4 times as long to scan and store a document in Acrobat Capture as in Laserfiche. Reviewing every scan was essential in Adobe Acrobat Capture because when using monospaced fonts it put spaces in between each letter on many check and invoice numbers.
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