June 2007

Datacap Capture Conference Registration Now Open

The second annual Datacap Capture Conference is set to kick off Monday, September 10 at historic Tarrytown House Estate overlooking the Hudson River in New York's lush Westchester County. Datacap users, partners and prospects will gather for two days of educational sessions, panels, user case studies and lots of fun activities.

Registration is now open to all attendees. Take advantage of the special Early Bird rate by signing up before July 31. Space is limited, so don't wait too long. Also, consider arriving early to ride in the Cycle Faster Challenge on Sunday, September 9, a brisk cycle ride with Datacap to raise funds for the Lance Armstrong Foundation. There will also be a Golf Outing sponsored by Fujistu, and a visit to one of the many historic sites of the Hudson Valley.

Tarrytown House is the perfect setting for a balance of learning and fun.

To learn more or register, visit us online.

What's New In Taskmaster 7?

Webinar Recording Now Available

The recent Datacap Webinar, "Flexible Capture and SOA in Taskmaster 7," is now available for free download. The 40 minute recording covers the new features in Taskmaster 7 that make it a huge leap forward for capture and forms processing.

For example, Taskmaster 7 is the first data and document capture solution to embrace web services for Services Oriented Architecture.

To view the recorded webinar, click here.

Computer Reseller News Reviews Taskmaster 7

New Release Earns Four-Star Rating

The June 15 issue of Computer Reseller News (CRN) features a review of Taskmaster 7 as part of a series on OCR and scanning solutions. "Virtually no other OCR vendor has put as much emphasis on rules processing," writes Mario Morejon, Technical Editor. "What Taskmaster brings to Datacap solution providers is a tremendous amount of flexibility."

To read the entire article, click here.

Learn more about Datacap Taskmaster 7, click here.

Cycle Faster B2B 2007 Summer Activities

Ride for a good cause this summer

Cycle Faster is Datacap's Benefit program to support the Lance Armstrong Foundation that started at AIIM in April and will wrap up at ARMA in October. Between AIIM and ARMA, individuals are pledging to ride this summer, raising money for each mile pedaled. Consider Sabrina Stratford, Senior Product Manager at Captaris. In just two months, Sabrina has met her individual fundraising goal of $1,000.

Sabrina's strategy for raising funds provides a great example of how to succeed. She crafted a humorous message explaining the benefits of Cycle Faster and sent it to everyone she knew. The message highlighted a fundraising challenge with Mark Litrell at Captaris, who is also raising funds for Cycle Faster, which generated a competitive excitement. She also forwarded a heartfelt plea to friends and family members through her Cycle Faster donor page on the LAF website.

According to Sabrina, the best way to succeed in raising funds for the Cycle faster program is to: "set a personal goal, make the donation process easy and worry free, maintain zero expectations and communicate the fact that no donation is too small"!

2007 Cycle Faster Sponsors include Fujitsu, Bowe Bell & Howell, Visioneer, EMC Captiva, Panasonic, Oce, Canon, Kodak, Kofax, ABBYY, DocuWare, AIIM, Parascript, Captaris, Content Analyst, Filebound and Snowbound Software.

Captaris' Sabrina Stratford posing with the Captaris Paperhead just before winning the Cycle Faster Time Trian at AIIM 2007

For a limited time, you can receive a custom Cycle Faster cycling jersey. Simply make a donation to LAF of $100 or more by visiting: http://cyclefaster.datacap.com.

For more information about the Cycle Faster Program, send an e-mail to marketing@datacap.com.

Webinar: Trends and Innovations in Invoice Processing

Featuring Andrew Bartolini of Aberdeen, a Noted Expert and Author on E-Payables

• Date: Tuesday, June 26, 2007
• Time: 2:00 PM ET
• Duration: 45 minutes

The landscape of Accounts Payable is changing fast. Once back office bastions of tradition, AP departments are embracing automation. Scanning and OCR, E-billing, P cards, electronic workflow and a variety of other electronic strategies are transforming the traditional world of paying bills, eliminating paper and changing longstanding AP processes.

Andrew Bartolini is Research Director for Aberdeen, and lead analyst on e-payables in the supply chain, covering procurement to payment, and author of the recent Aberdeen study "E-Payables, Advancing A/P Automation." Mr. Bartolini will join Datacap for this 45-minute webinar as we survey the impact that scanning and recent strides in OCR technologies are having on this venerable industry.

To Register, click here

The webinar will address the major issues facing AP departments today, including the benefits to automation, the obstacles to adoption and how organizations have surmounted them. We'll demonstrate the latest version of Taskmaster for Invoices and discuss ERP integration, including SAP certification.

We hope you will join us for this free, informative webinar.

ista N.A. Adds Remote Scanning to Invoice Processing

Property Managers scaning with BBH Sidekick scanners

ista North America (formerly USIEnergy) of Norcross, Georgia provides invoice processing and analysis services to residential and commercial property owners in the United States, as well as to branches of the U.S. military. A subsidiary of German-based ista, which services 10 million residents worldwide, ista N.A. consolidates bills from multiple utilities, simplifying management for property owners, and has been automating capture of invoice data with Taskmaster for Invoices for several years.

Now ista is adding new functionality to their Taskmaster implementation to benefit their customers even more.

Background

ista N.A. does more than process invoices - each invoice is individually audited to verify consumption, bill amount, due dates, and service period. After analyzing all the data captured, ista recommends ways to help landlords reduce cost and improve the overall performance of their properties. According to ista, Taskmaster for Invoices significantly expanded the company's ability to capture, process and manage data. The solution improved turnaround significantly and essentially eliminated data entry errors. According to David Richitelli, "The entire process used to take three days and now it takes only two."

Perhaps the most important benefit is the company's ability to manage additional work and expand into new markets. Adds Richitelli: "We went from serving 820 utilities and processing about 4,000 invoices per day to 1,700 utilities and over 4,800 invoices per day, that's a 20 percent increase in volume."

With these significant improvements, ista found that the return on their investment was quick. "ROI on the software was only a matter of months," Richitelli explains. "We had some other costs that we had to build in for developing the interfaces with our existing database, but even with these broader investments the payback on the project was only about a year and a half."

Adding Remote Capture

Taskmaster has worked so well that ista has been able to use it to reach new, previously untapped, market opportunities. Recently, the company began offering building managers Bowe Bell + Howell Sidekick scanners so that their invoices can be captured remotely and uploaded to ista via Taskmaster Web, a Datacap solution that uses a browser-based interface. The program, called SCANit!T, saves time and postage costs, and reduces the likelihood of invoices being lost

"We were previously focused exclusively on large property owners, but Taskmaster Web has allowed us to expand into a middle market of smaller apartment communities across the country, "says Richitelli. "These customers are less interested in having us pay the bills, but wanted us to capture the data, audit it and report it. Taskmaster Web has given us a lot more flexibility to expand our service and take advantage of this market opportunity."

To read the ista N.A. case study, click here.

Tips and Tricks

Use Smart Parameter Actions

When you need to locate or compare a value associated with a Field or Variable, Taskmaster offers a class of actions, called Smart Parameter Actions that can streamline the application set-up. For example, on the 1040 EZ tax application, once you capture the filer's Social Security Number, you can use that data to populate other fields via a database look-up, such as address, name of spouse and spouse's Social Security Number.

There are three Smart Parameter Actions in Taskmaster that you can use to configure these common functions:

1. Get (from)- Identifies a data source and assigns a value to the current object (field or variable) or another assigned object

2. Set (From, to) - Copies data from one place to another i.e. from a database to a field

3. Compare (from, to) - Compares the values specified by Smart Parameters

To read more about Smart Parameter Actions, visit the Technotes section on the Datacap Support website, and download the Smart Parameters doc.