Texas City Transforms Operations

Today, Aug 2005 by Sutcliffe, Sharon

McKinney water utility relies on AudioTel

AudioTel Corporation has been solving checkprocessing problems for hundreds of community banks for many years. Founded in 1993, AudioTel offers integrated solutions for proof of deposit, check imaging, document imaging, remittance, and microfilm replacement, as well as the optimum in Internet banking, Telephone banking, and Web site design and hosting. Named a Five Star Award winner (2004) by Independent Bankers Association of Texas, AudioTel has proven that not only do we provide excellent service but also innovative solutions that help our customers grow their business faster, enhance their profits, and gain efficiency. Over the years, more than 80% of our customers have come back to purchase an additional product.

According to recent U.S. Census estimates, McKinney, Texas is the fastest growing city in the United States.* In less than four years, their population has swelled by over 31,000 people - an increase of over 700 people a month. With this rapidly expanding population, the City of McKinney Water-Utilities Department saw a rising workload and knew their operations needed to be streamlined.

Problems They Were Facing

With only four employees, the McKinney Water-Utilities Department processes over 30,000 water bills per month. On peak days, they deal with anywhere from 2,000 to 2,500 payments. With a small staff and labor-intensive procedures, many days they went into overtime.

Each day, staff began by opening the mail and sorting the payments into four batches - one for each operator. The operators spent the next few hours going through the checks and coupons in their stack, manually entering the payments into their billing system and hand endorsing each check. Once this was complete, each of the operators created an adding machine tape of their batch. The batches were added together and compared to the total from their billing system. If the totals did not match, they faced the tedious job of finding and correcting the error. Afterward, each check was photocopied; the photocopy was stapled to the corresponding coupon and filed away in boxes. They would then manually fill out the deposit slip and send the checks to the bank.

The AudioTel Solution

With the AudioTel's RemitPlus System, McKinney successfully moved from doing everything by hand to a completely automated solution.

The department saw immediate results. Taking only three hours a day, the new workflow is simple and efficient. After they open the mail, they sort the checks and coupons and drop them on the scanner. At 180 checks per minute, this only takes about 20 minutes. During the scanning process, the system images the checks and coupons, reads and stores the amount on the checks (CAR/LAP), endorses the checks, reads and stores any identification numbers from the coupons, whether barcode or OCR. The system encodes the coupon with an audit trail (date and sequence number) and the check with date, sequence number, and customer account number captured from the scan line. If there are any exceptions, the system stops so the operator can enter any missing information. When the batches are balanced, with the click of a button, the system extracts all the information and updates their billing system.

The RemitPlus Benefits

The RemitPlus product is a turnkey, automated, image-based solution for remittance and payment processing. This system provides the ability to capture images of checks that have been submitted for payment and credit the payments to customer's accounts without manual key entry. Nearly all manual steps and consequent errors are eliminated from the process. Completely scaleable, RemitPlus can be used by anyone that processes payments, from the largest lockbox providers and financial institutions to the smallest non-profit organizations. Remit Plus is compatible with numerous scanners (including Canon, NCR, Unisys, Kleindienst, CTS, and Seac) and will accept any combination of scanners.

RemitPlus can bring the advantages of imaging technology to any organization that processes machine-readable documents, such as checks, coupons, stubs, and so forth. The documents are captured by the scanner and stored on the system, allowing rapid retrieval of the images for tasks such as customer inquiry, research, printing, and so forth. Before RemitPlus, McKinney spent hours at the copy machine making copies of the checks, and then storing the documents in boxes. The boxes piled up quickly and soon became a paper clog. If a customer called with questions about a payment, the staff had to search through box after box to find the customer's payment. With the RemitPlus System, they simply retrieve the images from their desktop and immediately answer the customer's questions.

With the latest in character recognition, RemitPlus provides substantial benefits for any payment processing organization. The system reads each document and saves the information (amount, checking account number, and so forth) that's needed for further processing. With this technology, McKinney was liberated from the chore of locating and entering data from the checks and coupons into their billing system.