Document Management - Texas Department of Public Safety

Document Logistix integrates with CAPPS to help streamline invoice payable tracking for the Texas Department of Public Safety

Using an agency wide 2020-21 biennial budget of $5.8 billion in state and federal funds, the Texas Department of Public Safety Finance Division provides budget, accounting, cash receiving, expenditure, and payroll services to the agency and its stakeholders. Austin is the core for the finance department for processing payable invoices across the expansive state of Texas with 254 counties from reviewing, keeping track of statuses for each invoice, and payments agency purchases.

Over 5,500 vendors that have completed business with TXDPS were identified, therefore it was extremely challenging to keep up with invoice status and payments. Like any large organization, it relies heavily on technology to help it perform its important tasks.

TXDPS Finance Department Business Challenges

The Finance Department at TXDPS decided to replace their existing payable invoice tracking systems with a single sourced document management system. They relied on a combination of paper, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft Outlook to process payable invoices and manually track the status of each payable invoice. TXDPS processes approximately 2,500 invoices per month. Many invoices were missed or deleted and ultimately cost TXDPS thousands of dollars monthly in interest per the Texas Prompt Payment Law. The Accounts Payable team spent a great deal of time manually entering invoice data, processing the invoices and each payor had a disparate process for completing the review and approval of each vendor invoice. As if their manual process wasn’t challenging enough, constant turnover was another factor that lead to the ultimate chaos of tracking the status of each invoice as well. Ultimately, there was no accurate method to consistently track: invoice status, accuracy, outstanding invoices, and number of invoices processed by each AP Payor.

This unstructured process was difficult to maintain, time-consuming and tedious. Searching for vendor invoices and associated correspondence was difficult and time consuming to find to answer questions about status of payments. 

Finance Department Business Needs

To optimize productivity, Texas Department of Public Safety and Document Logistix experts worked together to review business processes involving purchasing and Texas CPA CAPPS system.

Hosted solution

• One system for all AP Payors in the Finance Department to access for all Vendor
  invoices, payment vouchers, and correspondence.
• Reporting capabilities
• Invoice status
• Aging Report
• Number of invoices processed by AP Payor
• Automate the capture of payable invoices from emails and paper
• Automate the data entry with OCR and database lookups to autofill information
• Automate the assignment of each invoice to AP Payors
• Automate the sync of payment vouchers from TXCPA CAPPS Oracle system, as well as calculate multiple payments for a single vendor invoice to match the invoice total
• Criminal Justice Information Security (CJIS) compliance
• Ability for vendors to access their invoice documents and payment status through the TXDPS ITS portal

Document Logistix Solution for Finance ITS

Document Logistix provided a cloud-based Invoice Tracking Solution in Microsoft Azure Government that is CJIS compliant using our Document Logistix DM5 Web Content Management (ECM) services. This now allows vendors to submit invoices digitally to one invoice email box and the invoices are automatically routed to our Batch Capture product to ingest invoice payables, as well as paper documents and route the invoices to a centralized location to be assigned to individual AP Payor team members to be processed for payment. Based on TXDPS business processes, if there are any disputes or additional information required for an invoice the AP Payor can workflow the invoice to the appropriate status and track each vendor invoice assigned. Through dashboard reporting, management can view a summary or important details, such as: invoice payment status, or invoices over a certain dollar amount. This new ITS process for the Finance Department has improved the following:

• reduced processing time
• reduced interest payments to vendors for late payments
• improved productivity and team collaboration
• provides a more efficient use of AP Payors time, all invoices are now in one central location for search and retrieval, management has real-time access of reports
• Scalability and flexibility to modify work processes quickly and easily
• Significant savings in on-going software maintenance cost
• Elimination of paper from the premises, freeing up valuable floor space
• Improved staff efficiency and productivity
• Central management and storage of documents
• Greater security for information storage and compliance with state statutes and law enforcement practices
• Reliability of images stored digitally

The Document Logistix invoice tracking solution successfully fulfills current needs, provides tremendous help with automating current business processes, robust, stable and reliable system that supports the department's increasingly number of vendors and invoices processed at TXDPS. Document Manager was the clear choice to help improve the ITS business process and functionality or scalability. With approximately 200 TXDPS users, the finance department will open up the ITS solution to over 5,500 vendors to self-verify invoice status and allow the Finance staff to focus on getting vendors paid.

A4 PDF