Richard J Smith automates email filing with Virtual Cabinet

Amount of filing becoming impossible to manage

 RichardJ Smith & Co are specialist Insolvency Practitioners and Chartered Accountants with three offices based in the South West of the United Kingdom. The firm was receiving an overwhelming amount of paper and electronic correspondence (mostly emails)which was becoming impossible to manage.

‍Time to automate the process with document management

Shortly after becoming partner at Richard J Smith & Co in October 2016, Sam Bailey decided it was time to investigate a document management solution that could handle both the paper and electronic filing needs of the firm and make it more efficient.  

"To print all of our emails and ensure that they ended up in the correct file was becoming so time consuming, and the scale of the problem was only increasing."

- Sam Bailey, Partner, Richard J Smith & Co

Sam wasn’t especially concerned about transitioning to a paperless environment. The main issue was ensuring that file remained complete, and releasing staff from stacks of paper filing was very appealing.

Searching for a solution at R3 Annual Conference

With this in the forefront of his mind, Sam and a colleague attended the R3’s annual conference in Dublin and started to look into document management options. After some research and recommendations, it came down to two options.

"Following a demonstration of software at the R3 conference we spoke to our external compliance and file reviewer. He mentioned he’d seen Virtual Cabinet in a couple of the local firms that he deals with. This caused us to have a look at Virtual Cabinet."

- Sam Bailey, Partner, Richard J Smith & Co

The Virtual Cabinet team went down to Ivybridge, Devon, to demonstrate the product. Along with a further trusted industry endorsement the decision was made.

"Virtual Cabinet was strongly recommended to us by Simon Rowe, an Insolvency Practitioner partner at Milsted Langdon Chartered Accountants."

- Sam Bailey, Partner, Richard J Smith & Co

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Slaying email overload with automated filing

Once Virtual Cabinet was installed, the staff at Richard J Smith & Co started to digitise their paper files and could now also start reaping the benefits of the automatic email filing feature.

The stacks of paper and endless manual filing had become a thing of the past through the intuitive email capture, as emails are now automatically saving themselves into the correct file structure under the correct client.

"The emails I receive on cases can now automatically be filed to the correct client with Email Capture. This is a huge time saver!"

- Sam Bailey, Partner, Richard J Smith & Co

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New benefits to the business with task functionality

The firm have also found unexpected benefits within the task functionality of Virtual Cabinet. It has drastically changed their review process and allowed them to reduce the amount of email confirmation, further filing, and has streamlined their existing process.

"We use task functionality for our regular 1 month and 6 monthly file reviews, and for other one-off reviews. Administrators send me a task which has all of the relevant documents attached. By doing it this way, any comments or updates are captured on the file without needing to file the document. We find that this really works for us."

- Sam Bailey, Partner, Richard J Smith & Co

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