Mono County Assessor’s Office

Laserfiche and the Great Paper Purge

Mono County is located in the Eastern Central region of California with Nevada to the East and Yosemite National Park to the West. The population of Mono County is just over 14,000 residents.

Mono County has been using Laserfiche for over 15 years and became an ECS customer in 2018. The County is using Laserfiche in 10 departments with the Assessor’s Office coming on board most recently. Additionally they have upgraded to Laserfiche Avante to take advantage of new tools such as Workflow, Forms and Web Client.

The Assessor’s Office was facing a risk of being all paper. With increasing fire danger they felt it prudent to go digital, where they could retain backups in multiple locations. The goal was to digitize all their property assessment records, approximately 350,000 pages. A scanning partner was selected who delivered the digitized images in PDF format. The Assessor’s Office imported the documents into Laserfiche and utilized the Laserfiche SDK (Software Development Kit) to index and file the documents into their appropriate folders in Laserfiche. They also imported and indexed over 100,000 digital documents that were stored in the Windows file system. The digital documents were imported into the same Laserfiche folder structure to provide a central location where all files related to Assessor’s Parcel would be located.

Laserfiche has allowed the Assessor’s Office to eliminate their dependency on paper records, and with many County employees working from home during the COVID-19 lockdown, Laserfiche has also made it possible for staff to be more productive while working from home. Laserfiche has reduced the risk from paper records, increased efficiency for filing and storage with all digital files in one location, and eliminated the need of physical space for storing paper files.

The Assessor’s Office has added the Laserfiche Connector to allow easy lookup integration with their Assessor property tax software, Laserfiche Mobile for easy capturing and indexing photos of property while in the field. And Laserfiche Import Agent for easy import of documents directly from their Canon Copiers/Scanners.

According to Kirk Hardstrom, Information Systems Specialist for the County, the County uses Laserfiche because, “Laserfiche has an active user base, a library of additional functionality, and actively develops their software with new features and support for current environments, while keeping an easy-to-use intuitive user interface. They earn our business because of these qualities, and shine beside other legacy purpose-built applications whose vendors often fail to keep their products current, fail to create easy to use interfaces, and do not continue to invest in new features and functionality”.

Lessons learned by the Assessor’s Office during this project include:

• Carefully developing your template and index fields to reduce time to change it after the fact.
• Start small and play with your design.
• Don’t over engineer your templates and folder structure to a point where the system becomes difficult to use.