When I first joined the division twenty months ago, all agreements and invoices were still paper transmissions.
At the time the process for filling an invoice was:
- Consultant sends invoice up to Carson City for accounting.
- Accounting processes the invoice and sends it back down to my office in Vegas.
- The project manager reviews and signs invoice and sends it back up to Carson City.
- The deputy administrator signs the form and sends it across the street back to accounting for final processing and payment.
- Check is mailed down to the consultant.
In short, paying an invoice would involve moving one piece of paper 3 times (430 miles each) just to get processed, not including the check.
Let’s not even get into signing actual contracts, which require eight signatures and eleven steps.
If this virus had hit six months earlier (the official rollout for digital invoice processing happened in October), we would have been forced to go to the office just to perform the most basic task of paying our vendors and executing contracts.
I shudder to think about trying to develop these new processes without being able to meet in person, and while still learning how to work remotely!
Of all the unfortunate inconveniences of this pandemic, we were extremely lucky that we had just entered the 21st century with our document management.