Case study
Sometime in the early 2010s, we were approached by a client who had recently purchased a large package of cases for which the seller (the assignor) had provided all the documentation electronically. It was a couple of DVDs with more than 100,000 documents, with strange file names indicating the contract number and the natureof the document.
The client was thinking of buying a powerful document management system so that administrators could searchthrough documents efficiently, and to ensure that everyone could only see the documents they were entitled to. In addition, they also had to make sure that the documents were deleted when the claim was dropped: again, thispointed in the direction of not just copying files to a server, but taking document management seriously.
We reassured our client: the Indecs built-in document management server, Indoc, knows exactly what they need. We load the files, take care of tagging, metadata creation and assignment to cases, they just have to deal with the collection of claims. Every time the claim administrators needed a document, they got it with a few clicks. And in the meantime, Indoc didn’t slow down for a tenth of a second, the document was instantly available to everyone
What is Indoc?
xpectation was that it should not have problems storing up to a hundred million files, and that the retrieval timeshould not increase significantly as the number of files grows.
It was also a basic principle that all Indecs documents should be stored exclusively in Indoc, and that thesedocuments should be read/write accessible via a single endpoint. This makes it easy to protect documents fromunauthorised access.
Any files can be uploaded to the Indoc document repository: PDF, images, Office documents, other binary files.
Document management in Indecs
From the very beginning of Indecs’ development, we have placed great emphasis on documenting ourcommunication with our customers as well as possible. An important part of the case data sheet is the “list of messages exchanged“, where outgoing and incoming mail can be viewed in chronological order, or telephoneconversations can be listened to. The images of messages are built into the business screens, so users do not needto use a separate PDF viewer. This makes it quick and easy to scan correspondence, supported by the usualdisplay tools: zoom in, zoom out, select, etc.
Writing letters from Indecs
One of the most important operations in debt management is writing letters to customers. Indecs supports thiswith a number of functions:
✔ Letter templates
✔ Runtime extensible data fields
✔ Tables
✔ Use of graphics
Letters can be written individually or in bulk, whichever suits your business better. If printing is handled in-house, we can send them to a printer, but we can also choose an external printer or mailing company.
We can also send the letters electronically: by e-mail, via VIEKR, via company gateway.
E-mails
When sending documents by email, there are several convenient features that make working easier:
The latter feature is very important, as sending financial or personal information via an open email that can be read by anyone is not recommended.
SMS
Last but not least, we should mention Indecs’ SMS sending capability, which also works with letter templates. In fact, the SMS is treated as a very short, unformatted letter.
Credit documentation
In most cases, the purchase of a debt also provides access to a large amount of electronic documentation, whichis a great help to the debt collectors in the recovery process. The loader is able to load a huge number of background documents into Indoc at once, and then sort them efficiently and quickly according to differentcriteria, so that the right information is available for each case: contracts, valuations, reports, assignments, etc.
Technical documents
During the operation of the system, numerous operational logs, export and import files are created and stored as files. Indoc, the central document repository, is the perfect solution for this. If a question or complaint arisesduring the loading of a batch of claims, the original files can always be checked, as long as they do not need to be deleted for GDPR reasons.
FUser attachments
At many points in Indecs, it is possible to add comments to each data item through a single interface. This diary“component” is very popular with our clients, as they can enter text not only for a case, but even for a propertyor a single financial transaction, without any volume limits. This user diary is designed so that any size and volume of document can be attached to each “blog entry“. If there is a need to justify why something has beenprocessed in one way or another, just write an entry next to it and attach the document that justifies the process. This makes it very convenient to explain and justify each business step.
Confidential documents, GDPR
An important feature of Indoc is that it allows you to mark certain files as documents containing sensitivepersonal information. If such a mark is given to a file, it can only be viewed with special privileges, usually onlyby managers. Usually, this happens when a company accidentally comes into possession of a document that(also) contains information about a debtor’s personal health. Such documents are often sent in by the debtorhimself, but should be deleted as soon as possible This deletion obligation also applies, of course, to all general documents containing personal data . elating to closed cases. In accordance with data protection rules, after the legally defined period of time, these letters willalso be deleted, not just the fields in the database tables.