Xpyria Investment Advisors in Pittsburgh, $412 million in assets under management and serving 140 high-net-worth and institutional clients, began scanning and electronically storing all customer-related documents in the middle of last year. "Great timing on our part by the way," notes president and CEO Joe Salpietro facetiously, referring to the bear markets of late 2008. Documents are scanned at 300 dpi in black and white and stored into a Laserfiche document management system; although Salpietro would like to store documents in color at 600 dpi, "my experience is, those documents become so huge that even a one-page document turns into a megafile and if you need to email it, you can't without buying email servers."

Recently, the firm used the software's new workflow module to automate a formerly paper-intensive trading process. A two-page confirm sheet needed to be circulated to six people in the office for approvals, "but you never knew exactly who had it, where it was in the process, who the author was, who the trader was," he says. "It was organized chaos. Workflow enabled us to push this document in a systematic fashion to the people who needed to sign off at various stages of the process." If anyone in the chain is out for some reason, the workflow automatically redirects the document to another principal in the firm. Anyone can check the status of a trade by finding it in Laserfiche, and if there is a bottleneck, it's easily identified. And electronic signatures, Salpietro feels, are more secure than handwritten ones that can be easily forged. The final trading sheet is uploaded as a .csv file to the account file.

Xpyria built a trading applet that pulls information directly from the firm's Advent Axys accounting software to automatically populate the trading sheet, which saves time but also prevents errors — traders are limited to trading within that client's account.

Integration with the firm's CRM software, Junxure, means that when a client calls anyone call type the customer account number into the CRM database, access all related documents and answer customer questions immediately. "From an efficiency perspective this has helped, I'm not sure you can put a price tag on that," Salpietro says.

Another category of paperwork that's been automated with scanning and workflow is the firms "chron folders." These are folders that keep a record of all activity on a client's account and that need to be reviewed by all associates once a week. "We used to physically print out every piece of paper coming or going and make a copy of it," Salpietro says. "We'd put it in the chron folder, and that would get passed from associate to associate and they would check off that they viewed it." Today that process happens automatically and electronically, all relevant documents are automatically extracted from a repository and put into a chron folder, and then pushed out to all the associates simultaneously so that everybody can look at it at their leisure.

Salpietro believes his firm has saved hundreds of thousands of printed pages per year. There's less walking around and pushing around of paper. Information can be found more quickly using a search tool. Through use of a feature called quickfields, the firm plans to autotag and autofile quarterly reports.

Other technology projects on Xpyria's drawing board include networking upgrades to enable telecommuting, network monitoring software, and two-factor authentication.