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.
The basic concept
Practitioners confirm that the hardest part of tax preparation is getting information out of clients. Usually data from clients arrives in dribs and drabs as you chase them for different documents to verify their income and expenses. Or you might be lucky enough to receive the documents in a single wodge of paperwork.
Many firms already scan incoming correspondence and documents, but it takes up a lot of qualified staff time to sort through the scanned image files to pick out the correct documents, transfer them to client files and organise them for entering data into a tax preparation program.
CCH Scan Management still requires some human intervention to sort and identify incoming documents (using "target" sheets that are fed with the paper through the scanner) and to review the output to ensure the scanner has captured all the pages clearly. But a significant proportion of the administrative drudgery has been automated, so that all the scanned documents end up in a single PDF file, organised to match the data structure of the self assessment tax return.
Once the standard scanned TIFF files reach the CCH Scan Management in-tray (a specified file directory on your PC or network), the program applies optical character recognition to the images. The interpreter has been programmed to recognise key titles, phrases and document layouts to assign them to bookmarked headings within the target PDF file (see left). If it cannot recognise a file - for example someone’s handwritten covering note - it will go into an “unclassified” section.
When it comes to reviewing the PDF, CCH has written a plug-in for Adobe Acrobat called PDFlyer to let accountants organise the bookmarks and annotate the individual documents.
A single user licence costs £300, accompanied by a £105 annual fee and includes the PDFlyer plug-in; further licences are available at lower rates the more copies you buy. CCH Scan Management can operate as a standalone package within your practice, but it can also integrate and take advantage of further options such as CCH Central and its Document Online portal system - but these facilities will cost more.
How it works in practice
It all sounds pretty simple - but how does it work in real life? Once you’ve loaded the software, you will need to configure it to accept files from the scanner you’re using, and point the program at your target file directory. You will also need a copy of the Adobe Acrobat Standard or Professional, with the PDFlyer plug-in loaded.
Our test pack included 24 sheets, plus two target sheets, one of which told the software what the file name should be and the other instructed the program to tread the following pages as a single document. Using a compact A4 Canon imageFORMULA DR-2050C duplex scanner, it took just over a minute to input all the pages.
The file then appeared in the CCH Scan Management in-tray directory. After a short wait the software picked it up and got to work for another couple of minutes. When it was done, the program alerted me that our “Test Client1” PDF was now available for viewing.
Apart from two unclassified documents, all the other pages were included in appropriate sections within the readymade bookmark structure: CCH Scan Management had recognised a P60 and P11D and stored them in the employement section, while a coding notice was stored under the HMRC bookmark. One of the unclassified documents was a handwritten cover note that came through upside down. Within PDFlyer, I was able to rotate it (without affecting the orientation of other documents) and bookmark it as Correspondence.
The PDFlyer tool has several other useful features. If you scan in another file or someone sends you one, you can merge it into the existing client file and bookmark structure. As you work through the documents, you can annotate each one with salient notes (eg 50:50 split for interest on a jointly held account), eave checkmarks that you have reviewed a page, or even open a calculator and work out the relevant values that you will want input to the tax form.
Conclusion
And that, in short summary, is what Scan Management does. The possibilities for a paperless tool like this are very exciting. For example, once a document has been recognised and catalogued as a relevant tax document, what’s to prevent the data from being extracted automatically to the tax form?
CCH ProSystem’s tax program already has a number of workflow assignment tools and triggers, and once again, Scan Management could potentially hook into these to deliver further productivity gains.
These are logical steps that spring to mind when shown the potential of an application such as this. While not discounting my speculations, CCH product manager Wendy Rowe explained that in the real world, “The main driver for Scan Management is dual-screen working. People have the bookmarked PDF on one screen and just put the figures into the tax program on the other screen.”
In other words, anything more adventurous will have to wait until practitioners get through this self assessment season.
What CCH Scan Management does is very clever. But it goes about its task without fuss or drama in exactly the way that any good business application should. Putting together an indexed electronic document specifically for SA100 processing is so simple and sensible from a practical point of view that you wonder why no one has thought of it before. So credit to CCH for doing so. Now let’s find out whether UK agents are ready for paperless tax processing.