https://www.usef.org/

The national governing body for equestrian sport, U.S. Equestrian Federation has been dedicated to pursuing excellence and promoting growth, all while providing and maintaining a safe and level playing field for both its equine and human athletes. To manage paper in the accounting department and quickly access files requested by auditors, USEF implemented TrinDocs. The solution integrates seamlessly with their existing Microsoft Dynamics GP software and helps manage Accounts Payables invoices, General Ledger journal entries and supporting documents. By using TrinDocs, the organization has realized a faster document retrieval time, streamlined audits, reduced paper storage, and is poised to expand the TrinDocs functionality into other departments.

USEF processes 80,000 membership packets annually in addition to the 40,000 they process for the U.S. Hunter/Jumper Association (USHJA). Having technical developers on staff, they had designed and written a system to manage their membership applications so they were familiar with the document management concept. However, this application was specific to the membership department only, and their organization needed a solution to manage paper in the accounting department.

They use Microsoft Dynamics GP for their accounting software and needed an integrated solution to help manage two specific areas for them:

• Accounts Payable invoices and supporting documents
• General Ledger journal entry supporting documents

Like most companies today, USEF had several storage boxes and units for historical Accounts Payable invoices and supporting documents. They archive 7,500 AP documents a year and wanted some way to reduce the storage and retrieval time of the documents. They are spending a minimum of 2 hours a week filing, retrieving, and re‐filing documents.

Another area USEF wanted to streamline was their annual spring audits. USEF processes approximately 1,000 journal entries a year, and their auditors have requested to review up to 150 supporting documents and would require electronic copies of all documents in question. For each request from the auditors, the accounting department would have to decide where the documents were stored, go to the filing cabinet or storage unit, find the supporting documents, scan them, email them to the auditor, and then re‐file them in the proper location. With each visit to the filing cabinet or storage unit, USEF hoped that the documents were properly filed initially. If not, more time was involved trying to locate the documents. Even when the documents were properly filed, USEF would spend 19 hours providing the requested documents to the auditors.

TrinSoft has been the trusted Microsoft Dynamics partner for USEF since 1999 and was familiar with their accounting business process and needs. However, since this was a new project for USEF, TrinSoft spent time with their controller and the accounting staff to learn more about their current processes, the specific issues with documents and the results he expected to see with a document management solution.

After several meetings and visits, TrinSoft proposed a solution using TrinDocs that would achieve their goals with little impact on their current processes and deliver functionality that can be later expanded into other departments. USEF continues to key their AP invoices and General Ledger journal entries into Dynamics GP and takes one additional step while on the transaction entry screen to print a bar code label of the transaction to a Dymo LabelWriter ® label printer. Once all invoices/journal entries are entered into Dynamics GP and labeled, the scanner administrator scans the stacks of paper into their existing scanners. Using TrinDocs tools, the electronic documents are uploaded into TrinDocs and separated by bar code into unique documents. Since the documents are linked to Dynamics GP using the bar code transaction number, TrinDocs reads additional data from Dynamics GP so users can search in TrinDocs for a copy of the electronic document. Once the values from Dynamics GP are stored in TrinDocs, the controller then sees the documents in his TrinDocs inbox to review and approve. Once approved, the document is complete and filed for electronic retrieval.

Little impact on current process

For Accounts Payable, this process does not change their daily processing of invoices and saves them two hours a week of filing and retrieving documents.

Faster, accurate retrieval

For auditors, USEF can now quickly search TrinDocs using various fields and open a PDF copy of the documents using Adobe Reader. Within Adobe Reader, they can print or email the PDF copy to the auditors just like any other PDF document.

Reduced storage requirements

USEF began using TrinDocs in October 2011. They decided to keep paper copies for the remainder of 2011. Then beginning in January of 2012, the accounting department scans and shreds all accounts payable invoices and supporting documents. Instead of consuming one filing cabinet per year for documents, they now only use one storage box. As they continue to shred, they will eliminate up to 8 filing cabinets.

Supports various types of bar codes with ease

Early in the process, USEF realized several of their paper invoices included a bar code printed by the vendor. The design of TrinDocs allowed us to create a unique bar code formula that will ignore the pre‐printed bar codes and only read values printed from Dynamics GP. USEF only had to add the bar code formula to the TrinDocs setup, and from then on, all preprinted bar codes were ignored.

Scalability for other departments

If USEF decides to expand into other departments or documents, everything is installed and ready. They have the tools, training, and skills as TrinDocs administrators to create new documents and workflow rules.