What percentage of your documents do you put in Records Series/RME in your repositories?

replied on December 4, 2017

"What goes in, must come out." - That is how we like to operate. For new implementations, the question is, "in what records series will this reside"? It's a bit of a philosophical question, Michael, because it's an ideal you strive for but can almost never reach completely.

I saw this was originally posted 3 years ago. You are probably an old pro by now!

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replied on October 31, 2014

somewhere around 30%

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replied on October 30, 2014

We started with everything in Record Series, then ran into troubles. We now have everything in the staff folders and have developed an Archival process with easy ways for staff to mark the documents for that Archival process which will run automatically every January 1st. Some folders are also marked for the Archival WF to handle every Jan 1st, at which time all docs in those folders will be moved. Every Jan 1st, anything marked for Archival gets removed to R.S., with shortcuts left behind if the staff have used a tag asking for a shortcut.

As far as the original question, what percentage? We are still in the pilot stage, with only about 2 out of about 40 staff actively working in LF, but we estimate that 90-95% of all documents will eventually end up in the R.S. folders. Only reference material or templates/forms, etc., will not.

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replied on June 16, 2017

Hi Connie,

My City is currently working in implementing Laserfiche for working and archival records (which we hope to apply retention to).

I was hoping you could expand on the troubles you ran into when having everything in a records series and maybe delve into the system you have now? lessons learned?

I'm a bit daunted by configuring the system knowing that there is a lot I haven't considered. Any input would be appreciated!

thank you.

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replied on June 19, 2017

Hi Robyn:

Currently, we still have our Working Documents outside of Laserfiche, final records are brought in and stay in the folders they were brought into until end of December. At end of year, the documents are pulled out via a Workflow and taken to the Record Series for lock-down and the beginning of their Retention time. The workflow leaves behind a shortcut.

1) Reason for leaving them in place until year end - This is done because we found our staff bring in documents that are still actively being used. Maybe pages are added after the fact, or I discover quality control issues and go back to them and ask them to redo or change something, or they remember they needed to add something to the metadata. Or, what they thought was the final document ended up having to be revised (imagine a letter about to be sent in the mail and someone discovers a typo at the last second; then they retype, get it signed again, scan it in again; then they need to delete the first one). Leaving everything in place for awhile eliminated a lot of frustration on everyone's part.

2) New procedure about to be undertaken - we are about to begin setting a field for every document that will determine where they end up in the Record Series folders at the end of the year. All folders will be set with a Retention field choice. Any documents placed in folders will automatically get their Retention field updated to match the folder they are in. That way, when year end comes up and I come into the office after January 1st, I don't have thousands of documents that I have to determine what Record Series folders each of them needs to be in (which is what we have been doing - not good!). The choices have been made by the owners of the documents, without them even knowing it.

3) How does Workflow know what documents to archive? - I have indicators on all folders that the staff use, and two workflows that run at year end. The first WF checks each folder for the "Archive" indicator. If it finds it on a folder, it is to add an Archive tag to each of those documents. The second WF just grabs all the documents with Archive tags and pulls them into an "Incoming" folder that I then sort through before moving items into the set Record Series folders.

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replied on June 19, 2017

Thank you for taking the time to respond to me, Connie. There are some great lessons and ideas here. Best of luck with your implementation! I think that autofiling is a great idea and will certainly save you hours and hours of time!

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replied on October 30, 2014

I don't have a lot of personal experience, however, our clients have the same wide range of use. Some put everything in them, others just a few document types. Since every document has a retention schedule (even if it is a "live" document that isn't ready for archival) it can be really hard to determine where everything should go. No one likes to drag and drop documents from "manila" folders to RME folders when they are ready for archival.

If you run everything through a Transparent Records Management workflow, that makes things a lot easier. The difficult part is identifying all of the different document types and which record series they need to point to - then having to build a parallel manila folder structure for your day-to-day users to look at. Lots of configuration up front, but it makes it a lot easier to have everything filed under Record Series if every single doc type is being run through a filing workflow.

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What percentage of your documents do you put in Records Series/RME in your repositories?

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