San Mateo County Department of Housing & Community Development

Compliant Document Sharing with Laserfiche Makes HUD Audits a Breeze

Home to some of nature’s giant Redwoods is a county that is both coastal and bayside – San Mateo County. This Silicon Valley-area county has grown tremendously over the last couple of decades, so efficiency within the county government is a must. It remains one of the top high income counties in the United States, but homelessness and the availability of affordable housing continues to be a problem. Luckily for citizens, the Department of Housing (DOH) works tirelessly to help them find the housing resources and permitting information they need.

The department is split into two separate divisions, the Housing Authority (HACSM) and Housing & Community Development (HCD), both of which use Laserfiche to streamline their operations.

Before Laserfiche, the department was overly dependent on paperwork and folders. You might remember a time that your organization was the same way. In fact, you might still be using a physical paper process and looking for an electronic alternative, like the San Mateo Department of Housing was 9 years ago.

Close your eyes and picture an office with stacks of folders on every desk and filing cabinets lining the walls. Walk across the office and through the doorway to find an entire room dedicated to filing cabinets. Rows of them – 40 or 50 to be precise. Imagine how many emails you would get every day asking about the whereabouts of a particular file. It would be near constant!

Now, open your eyes to see an office free of clutter, with new, smiling faces in the old filing room. This is what the County of San Mateo Department of Housing’s office looks like now, thanks to their investment in the Laserfiche enterprise content management system and ECS Imaging. Files are easy to locate, update, and send, saving countless hours and significantly reducing the hassle involved in fulfilling a request.

The HACSM uses Laserfiche to keep and store applications for rental assistance, income and residency verification documents, and all other case management paperwork. The HCD division stores a variety of program-based content, such as contracts, loan documents, and construction documents. They even use Laserfiche to store and submit documents to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), as Laserfiche meets their compliance standards for audits and saves invaluable time and effort among employees.

“Laserfiche has solved our content management needs, both internally and with our main funder, US-HUD,” says Norman Pascoe, Departmental Systems Analyst for the DOH.

Making the switch to Laserfiche has allowed the HUD auditing process to run smoothly and securely, making it easy for the County of San Mateo to continually receive the funding they need.

While making the switch to Laserfiche ECM, the Department of Housing took a unique approach that is worth noting. Since it is always difficult to bring change to an organization, they chose to move gradually, with just a few work teams using the software in the beginning. As these first teams were able to see time savings in searching for and sharing files, they were able to use these wins to increase excitement amongst those who were next to explore the Laserfiche rollout.