Review: CCH Scan Management
With self assessment season looming, AccountingWEB has been exploring the options for applying document management tools to the task. One solution that was brought to our attention was CCH Scan Management, so John Stokdyk took a closer look.
The complex nature of business software sometimes means that you have to plough through pages and pages of screen shots and descriptions to get a handle on what a program does and how it works.
This review isn’t going to be like that. Once you have physically fed your documents into a scanner, most of what CCH Scan Management does goes on in the background. The program appears on screen within the usual frames and conventions of CCH ProSystem, but for the most part you either end up looking at the scanner’s own software dialogue box, or PDF files in Adobe Acrobat.
Continued...
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My mistake... (article now corrected)
You're absolutely right, Charles. Thanks for pointing the error.
My apologies to all concerned. When discussing the article with CCH I misheard "Reader" for "Standard". CCH have clarified that you are correct. As a side point, one of the reasons they bought a job lot of Canon scanners was because they came bundled with copies of Acrobat.
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John Stokdyk, Technology editor
Lots of potential
This IS a nice product - provided you are clear what it can and cannot do. You do still need a human in the process, although the software can streamline the 'paper-shuffling' process, and take paper out of the process that much faster.
I would hope that, once CCH have completed the integration of the the MYOB product lines with their own, that we can see some of the potential being realised.
Use Case
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You are in PerTAX (sorry - CCH Personal Tax!) and click into an income-source (Dividends, say)
CCH Scan Management launches on your second monitor, opens the PDF file, and jumps to the correct section in the document (showing scanned copies of dividend vouchers)
You select the appropriate figure in the scanned Dividend Voucher, and it copies the figure into the software.
From that point on - users can quickly access the scanned image by clicking a hyperlink within the software ("Show source document").
Lovely!
Adobe Acrobat
Just for the sake of clarity, John....
You say that..
"You will also need a copy of the Adobe Acrobat Reader or Professional, with the PDFlyer plug-in loaded"
As far as I can tell, you need a copy of Adobe Acrobat Standard or Professional to make use of the PDFlyer plug-in (Adobe Reader won't work). You do say this in your initial bullet points so maybe it's just awkwardly worded!
Based on the best price for Acrobat Standard I could find on the Interweb - that adds another £129 to the cost for each user who wants to use PDFlyer.
Of course, one could envisage that not all users would need PDFlyer, if someone was responsible for preparation and collation, and then passed the finished PDF on to a fee-earner who would have read-only access to the file...