As any K-12 administrative staff member knows, the student enrollment process can cause a lot of headaches. A typical school can process a dozen forms for every new student. And when these forms are on paper, it can take an excessive amount of time. Parents share in the frustration of paper based forms as well. If a family has children in elementary, middle school and high school, they may have to repeat the tedious enrollment process three times.
Document management for K-12 school districts can seriously reduce the time and frustration of dealing with cumbersome, tedious paperwork during the enrollment process, making life easier for staff and parents alike. Here are just a few of the ways document management can streamline student enrollment:
Eliminating Clutter
Relying on paper documents causes unnecessary clutter, and makes simple processes such as locating files much more time-consuming than they need to be. With a document management system in place, everything from transfer forms, to student enrollment records, to transcripts can all be digitized and stored in a single central location.
Reducing Errors
Paper documents are much more susceptible to being lost, misplaced and damaged than digital documents. With all the duties required of administrative staff, mistakes are bound to happen regardless of procedures and processes. As your staff member is combing through a student’s enrollment paperwork, he or she is also answering phones, attending meetings, and multitasking throughout the day. No matter how experienced your staff is, this is going to lead to a misplaced document here and there.
Additionally, with electronic forms (“eforms”), parents can fill out enrollment forms online which eliminates the need for administrative staff to decipher handwriting or key in data into multiple systems. This reduces the opportunity for data entry errors.
Streamlining Processes
Whether your staff member is trying to locate complete student enrollment records or specific lines of data, document management systems automatically categorize and store files so that they can be searched and accessed instantly whenever they are needed. This means that tasks which previously took minutes to complete now take just seconds, so your entire administrative office will run faster and smoother than ever before.
Remote Access
Managing student enrollment involves many departments at many different levels. A document management system allows you to securely store documents online. This means that if something comes up, and your staff needs to pull up a student enrollment record from their laptop or home computer, a document management system allows you to authorize certain staff members to access the information they need from anywhere.
Finally, perhaps the most appealing part of upgrading your student enrollment management system by adding document management software is that it will save your district money. By streamlining time-consuming processes, and digitizing paper documents, you will be able to significantly reduce paper from your budget. Additionally, cutting process times in half will make your business office more efficient and less likely to make mistakes that cost your district money in the long run.