Dumont Diaries: Financial Department

The Financial Department has been organized and is ready for scanning to begin a paperless environment. They're on the way to saving! The Building Department has already integrated our system into their every day life.

In order to expedite the scanning process, documents are organized physically by our customers and then entered into our system by our highly-skilled staff. This allows our customers to most easily find their documents because the systems uses a vocabulary which they choose. We always want you to be able to find your documents as quickly and as easily as possible!

Dumont Diaries: Building Department

As we enter into the holiday season, we are happy to say that the scanning for Building Department is on track. We look forward to beginning our work with the Finance Department on Tuesday November 29th. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Dumont Diaries

New things are always happening at FileBank as we improve our services for you, our clients! As you may have heard, we have recently engaged Dumont as our new client. We are helping them jump into the 21^st century along side with their mayor and staff.

Our services will change their offices into organized, and pleasant working environments. I hope you stay along for the ride as we track how their everyday lives are changed through our system.

The city of Dumont’s government serves over 17,000 people, which naturally means that they have a lot of paperwork to deal with. Starting with the Building Department, FileBank is helping Dumont to scan their blueprints and papers associated with each house and building within the city limits.

When finished, Dumont will easily be able to access the documents related to each building. Finding the repair work done on a particular house ten years ago will become a breeze. Steve Cavadias, the director of the Building Department, will be working closely with us as we begin to show Dumont how amazing this transformation can be.

When finished, we will be moving on to the Clerk, Finance and Payroll departments for their own extreme makeovers. Our archivist and staff will frequently visit Dumont onsite to demonstrate the computer system so they are easily able to access their documents.

Customer service, naturally, is our most important goal! We are working to go above and beyond because we know how difficult the transition to paperless can be. But we can assure you that it is worth the momentary difficulties and we hope that after seeing Dumont’s transformation, you will become a convert too.

As always, feel free to check out our website at www.filebankinc.com or give us a call at 972-279-4411. We are always happy to talk with you!

Jumping to Digital Means Jumping to a Sustainable Future

(Paper waiting to be recycled at a recycling facility. Often we forget that this process uses valuable energy.)

“Going green” – it’s a concept that we hear a lot about these days. We hear about it on commercials, in our offices, via government initiatives that exhort us to help the environment. Everyone agrees that helping the environment is important – but many disagree over what methods are best to accomplish this goal. Often in our rush to change light bulbs and split our recycling into cans and bottles and plastic, we forget that the most basic ideas are the best ones.

At FileBank, our effort to help the environment revolves around one simple goal: to use less paper. And by less paper, in many cases we mean no paper at all. Think about the future in which offices around the nation will be entirely digital – it is not a matter of “if,” but rather “when.” FileBank exists to help businesses transition into that future as quickly as possible. We have many solutions that businesses can take advantage of – and the benefits are literally endless when one considers the positive, permanent environmental impact these solutions have.

Going paperless means so much more than just saving trees. It also means lessening the carbon footprint that will be produced by cutting down and processing those trees for paper. It means less energy wasted on recycling the paper for reuse, and less energy to ship it from place to place and store it. The space needed to accommodate our physical archive space versus our digital servers is a telling comparison: while we need a facility the size of a football field to store documents, we can use a room you could barely park a car in to manage our digital records. As more and more businesses and government entities embrace the paperless lifestyle, the need for giant storage facilities will slowly disappear. As energy resources transition to renewable methods rather than carbon belching fossil fuels, the whole planet will benefit from these efforts to modernize how America does business.

So if you’re considering going paperless, make sure to think not only of the benefits you’ll have tomorrow, but the benefits that generations will have in the future. When you’re thinking about the costs, make sure to also think of the environmental costs of not acting soon.

Since going green is such an important theme of FileBank’s work, I will continue to update you on news, projects and other initiatives related to this topic.

Stay tuned!

Vanessa Banti
Master Archivist

FileBank Launches LL 84 Initiative To Assist Property Managers in NYC

Interacting with government policy is one of the most challenging tasks a business can take on. Recently, that challenge in New York City became a little bit more difficult with the passage of local law 84. LL # 84 is a recent measure passed in order to help make NYC’s buildings greener and more energy efficient. According to this law, owners of buildings in the city are responsible for benchmarking how much energy and water they use every year, and then saving this information for 3 years, and making it available for inspection by the government during that time. Though this law might seem like just another example of so much more bureaucratic red tape, FileBank has devised innovative, cost effective solutions that can assist property managers in compliance.

FileBank is prepared to become a property manager’s back office in order to make compliance with LL 84 a breeze instead of a chore. Because of our company’s convenient location in urban New Jersey, we already make frequent deliveries and other work related trips into the city. Our customers already enjoy the benefits of having all the functions of a back office delegated to FileBank: their documents are instantly accessible online through an easy-to-use system, their physical files are available to be delivered to their offices on a one hour or overnight basis, they receive professional help interacting with local government, and their files are shredded in a safe, redundant process when they’ve reached their expiration date. We intend to apply all of these skill sets to clients that want assistance complying with LL 84.

So stay tuned for more news about this exciting new initiative. FileBank is eager to contribute to the creation of a greener community in NYC, and to the bottom line of our business neighbors across the river.

Until next time,

Vanessa Banti
Master Archivist

Metadata: What Digitization Can Tell You About Your Own Organization

One moment of truth arrives for every type of organization: the point at which you have to determine if you are meeting your goals, selling your product, making that difference that you want to make. In the digital era, these types of moments are influenced constantly by the information exchanged over the Internet. To know whether you’ve reached one of them, you need to be connected. And increasingly, to be able to recognize them, you need to have a huge amount of information about your own organization.

Metadata is exactly the type of information that your organization will need to determine if its goals are met. Metadata tells you how your internal numbers have stacked up: whether it has to do with very concrete considerations like accounting and payroll, or less tangible ones like quality of your product, the nature of your client base, etc.

Is it possible to track metadata regarding the documents you store in your office? Of course! At FileBank, part of my job is to keep track of totals regarding various aspects of each client’s account with us. I am able to tell a client about simple tallies like how many boxes of which type they have stored with us, but also which boxes are ready to be destroyed and when, whether the organization will be regularly producing more of the content of those boxes, or whether the majority of the organization’s collection is to be permanently stored. All of this type of information classifies as metadata.

FileBank’s analytics software also takes advantage of metadata, except it takes the numbers on the documents themselves – accounting tallies, for example – and analyzes these numbers to perform numerous types of financial forecasting that will help your business stay ahead of the curve. Our software shows you the precise type of information you need to be prepared for that moment of truth. It arms you with the knowledge to face any situation your organization might encounter, especially an economic one. With the nation’s economy seemingly stuck in a permanent state of volatility, it is knowledge that is sure to come in handy.

So I hope you too will start to embrace metadata in your workplace. Using it will not only put you ahead of the curve in terms of technology, but it will also make the results from your work that much more potent.

Until next time,

Vanessa Banti
Master Archivist

Sowing the Future’s Harvest: Working with Big Datasets

Big data is one of those concepts that few people can envision in their mind’s eye. Personally, I try to imagine a stack of paper that could be digitized into one gigabyte of information. Then I imagine stacks of paper that would fill 100 gigs of space. Then a terabyte’s worth, a whole server, a room of servers, ten rooms of servers, and on and on. Even with all these incremental steps, it is impossible to imagine how much data truly represents a “big” dataset. If we can’t even imagine it, how can we work with it, analyze it, search it to find the exact piece of paper among all the countless digital pages that we need for that day?

The McKinsey Global Institute recently published a report on the topic of big data , in which they discussed solutions that might be used to tackle this significant challenge of the future. They provide predictions and suggestions for how both government entities and the private sector will have to adapt to daily interaction with big data. McKinsey maintains a very positive outlook on how beneficial big datasets will be to society – FileBank shares this optimism, and we aim to harness it in every aspect of our work. FileBank CEO Greg Copeland recently had this to say about datasets and McKinsey's research on them: "The data gets bigger, the images more refined and consequently larger. The technology will from this pressure grow to meet these needs. The trends and benefits of this ever grander dimension will reap benefits to those who can sift through information and understand the driving undercurrent trends. "

But what does McKinsey’s research mean for the average sized organization, like a school, a small business, hospital, local government or office? In the future we will all have to use these big datasets efficiently, but how will we do it? Without a doubt, the key is familiarity and ease of use. It is one thing for technological wizards at groundbreaking companies to adopt big data, but quite another for a local employee. Once all of these trends become mainstream, and once platforms have been developed that can parse and sort through mountains of data with a single click, then the big data revolution will have truly arrived.

At FileBank, we believe that there are and will be many solutions available to both the public and private sector for handling big data in the future. While we develop those solutions within our own organization, we believe that keeping track of industry developments will be essential to all our customers. Please continue to check our blog for these industry updates and our analysis of them.

Until next time,

Vanessa Banti

Master Archivist

NJ DARM: The Essentials, Tricks, and Tips

It has happened to all of us, once in a while. We walk into the back room, the office basement, the filing closet down the hallway, and we see it. Stacks, piles, mountains of documents greet us, so many papers that we don’t even remember where they came from. This type of situation is common among even the most well organized office. Often, after a document has been used for its immediate purpose, we leave it in a box or a filing cabinet where it sits until spring cleaning transfers it to this infamous backroom. Our boss might wander down the hall and wonder “why can’t we just get rid of all this mess?”

The answer is that many types of documents have certain legal life spans, periods in which you are obligated to retain them. A purchase order, a student record, the blueprint for your building: all of these documents have a different time period that they need to be saved. The New Jersey state agency that keeps track of these laws is called the Records Management Services (RMS), formerly known as the Division of Archives and Records Management (DARM). In NJ, all public agencies such as schools, hospitals or municipal governments have to get RMS’s approval before they can legally destroy documents. A report that lists the contents of each individual box must be submitted to RMS with signatures from the agency in order to commence the destruction process. 

But here’s where disposing of old documents gets tricky: each type of document has its own unique code. Each department in a public agency has a unique schedule of retention codes which RMS provides online in PDF format. Sorting through all of these 100s of retention codes can be quite daunting! Fear not, for at FileBank this task is one of my specialties. If you keep a few essential points in mind when getting ready to destroy your documents, you will make working with RMS a simple, efficient experience. 

First: Are you putting all of the same type of document in each box? You would be surprised how easy it is to forget to do this! I have seen file boxes where someone literally took their entire inbox from their desk (plastic container included) and put it in a box to be destroyed. RMS will not accept boxes packed in this way, for there is no way to code all the mixed up documents in such a box. 

Second: Have you divided your boxes into their proper departments? An employee record and a purchase order are not part of the same department. This example is very obvious, but be careful that each set of boxes represents only one department – for RMS accepts one report per. 

Third: Don’t know if something can be destroyed? Look it up! The PDFs that RMS provides online have a search tool (the binoculars icon) that allows you to look up a document’s retention code by keyword. The more you reference these schedules, the easier it will be for you to identify those really tricky documents. 

Finally, pay close attention to signatures! In my experience, the destruction of obsolete files is most often retarded by a missing signature on one of the necessary forms. Depending on the type of agency requesting permission to destroy, 2-4 different signatures will be needed before RMS accepts a destruction report. Also, pay close attention to who is signing which fields. For example, Field 4 on the form must be signed by the Custodian of Records and Field 3 must be 

Feel free to post any questions you might have about RMS below. Also make sure to check the links side bar to the right of this post, where you can go to RMS’s website and learn more about what they do for NJ! Also, please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions specifically related to FileBank’s services in relation to RMS.

Welcome to our Blog!

Here at FileBank, going digital means embracing the future. Since the future of the information world means gaining instant access from any computer screen, we want to make sure you, our friends and customers, are up to date instantly on all things FileBank. So it is our pleasure to introduce you to our latest method of jumping to digital: our blog!

Check back here for frequent updates on FileBank news, industry news, our innovations and our new products. We envision that this blog will be a place for both our voice and yours. If you have questions, concerns, suggestions, or even just a cool newspaper article you think we should see, feel free to leave it here. 

As paper continues to disappear from offices around the country, as the cloud becomes ever more essential for multi-person computing, and as the irreversible trend of progress continues to change our lives, we will all need to adjust and adapt to our renewed world of technology. If FileBank is a part of your future, you can be assured that together we will meet these challenges with cost effective efficiency. Because when you jump to digital, you know that what’s inside is safe.

Stay tuned!

Until next time,

Vanessa Banti
Master Archivist