"People are constantly saying they love it, it’s great," says Tom Murphy, vice president of compliance and operations at the firm. Pre-installation, in June, "there were loads of boxes all around; they were worried about losing any piece of paper for compliance reasons," says Rick Lobel of Network Doctor, the value-added reseller that implemented the imaging system. "They've digitized a huge section of the paper part of their business, so now they can shred documents without having to keep all these papers around. The office looks a lot neater, everyone’s happier, more productive and they find it’s very efficient." Chores like assembling client records for regulators that used to take twelve hours, for instance, now take one hour. During client consultations, specific customer records can be summoned onscreen instantly.

To image incoming documents, summer interns have been scanning the paper into a few Fujitsu mid-range scanners. The interns type in an account number for each document while LaserFiche imaging/document management software captures the image. The LaserFiche software is integrated with the firm's new accounts database such that once the account number is entered, all the other needed fields, such as Social Security number, customer name, representative name and date, are automatically populated.

Digitizing all its documents has enabled Bishop Rosen to let many of its staff work from home. It's simplified compliance. "You get a request for information from FINRA or the SEC, and they don’t want it in seven days, they want it tomorrow," Murphy says. "A lot of the stuff we had was manual, so we were spending an inordinate amount of time going into files, copying documents and getting them ready and our regular business was suffering because of it." The LaserFiche software lets Bishop Rosen employees select a number of files, right-click on them, and save them to a CD that can be mailed to regulators. In fact, the system has been so successful at handling compliance requests that it's backfired a little. "Regulators will say, you got that done fast, I should ask for more. And they do," Murphy says.

The cost for the system was about $22,000, but Bishop Rosen is leasing it, "so we’re not feeling the pinch all up front," Murphy says.