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Housing Associations
Housing Associations deal with large and increasing volumes of information on properties and tenants. The storage space needed for all of the various documents such as deeds, contracts, maintenance records, invoices and personal details is a major problem. Locating specific pieces of information can be incredibly time-consuming and filing requirements difficult to keep on top of, up to date and accurate.
Housing Associations also face tremendous, sometimes conflicting pressures, the Audit Commission with its amended Key Lines of Enquiry and the Housing Corporation with its ‘traffic lights' scheme require ever improving performance against many parameters. The financial future of the Association depends on achieving high levels of customer satisfaction, which is labour intensive, while the cost of labour and materials continues to rise.
The only way forward is to improve business performance, cut internal costs and automate business processes, with the aid of proven technology. Our experience with Housing Associations has established that capturing documents electronically can deliver these cost and efficiency benefits whilst improving customer services.
Cut administration costs
- Reduce paper handling
Every time a document is handled, filed, retrieved, dispatched, etc, there are costs. There are also risks - of losing, misfiling, sending to the wrong address. All of these add yet more costs and drag down performance. Digital documents can eliminate all this cost and inefficiency. - Improve control over contracts
Housing Associations are frequently managing multiple contracts for repair and maintenance of stock, etc. Each contract involves correspondence, estimates, invoices as well as perhaps telephone messages, faxes and emails. The scope for error and delay is enormous. Again, electronic capture simplifies administration and improves control. - Improve management of records
Each tenant or account generates quantities of records, of rent payments, requests, repairs, complaints, etc. Digital documents make filing and retrieval simple and much less prone to error. - Save storage space
Many documents must be kept for very long periods. Electronic documents simplify the process, save expensive storage space and improve the scope for better data security.
Improving customer service with streamlined staff resources
- Reduce data entry errors
Capturing data from all forms of document, paper and electronic, enables information to be delivered to line-of-business applications, databases and archives quickly, securely and cost-effectively. The inevitable and expensive human errors in data entry are largely eliminated. - Eliminate delay
Managing information electronically eliminates the time-consuming manual handling of work requests, applications and correspondence. This results in a greatly improved speed of operation and freeing staff for other aspects of customer service. - Improve response times
This key parameter benefits in many ways: documents are where they should be, not sitting in an in tray, documents can be accessed simultaneously by all staff that need them and handling electronic data is faster than paper files.
Meet compliance standards
- Data handling
Capturing and digitalising documents gives faster, more secure handling of all the Association's documents. Improved business performance helps in achieving targets leading to improved ratings and funding. - Data Accessibility
Indexed documents can be accessed by unit, tenant, document type, date or any other useful parameter and from as many locations as required, simultaneously and with all the required security procedures. - Improved service to auditors
With digital documents the time to access and interrogate information is drastically reduced in whatever format required.
Our housing association clients include London Quadrant, Testway Housing, Riverside Group, Peabody trust - to find out more about our solutions and services for housing associations please contact us on 0207 314 7700 or fill in our contact form
