HR Files With Hang-Ups? Here’s Help!

Why HR Files Matter

Human resource records are highly regulated and contain sensitive data. Companies which don’t manage their HR files well open themselves up to liability. HR files are subject to audits by the Department of Labor, USCIS, and other regulatory agencies. Each record contains information that you should protect to protect your employees.

Your state sets policy regarding the management of these files. To further complicate matters, each employee must have at least two folders. The first is their primary personnel file, with a second record for immigration status files. Both business units and HR managers need to access or add to HR files. These files document pay increases, continuing education, or if an employee requires disciplinary action.

Paper is inefficient for retrieval, but paper files were the standard for a long time. If you’re looking to digitally manage your HR files, you first have to deal with those paper files. Do you scan them? Do you hire someone to scan them?  Then, where do you store them? How can you reduce the time to scan each file section, create a folder structure, and so on? Manually scanning, labeling, and storing each file is a tedious task.

HR File Scanning

The good news about HR files is that they are highly structured. They follow repeatable patterns. The file sections appear in the same order. Finally, most companies also file their active employee records alphabetically.

Highly structured files are perfect for capture tools like Laserfiche Quick Fields. Quick Fields are included or available at most levels of the Laserfiche product suite. Quick Fields can read HR file cover sheets between each file section.  This tells the application to create a new document. There are other capture tools available that will do the same thing, of course, but we prefer Laserfiche.

How Does A Capture Tool Work?

Quick Fields is an application with a set of tools that let you rapidly process files and documents. Quick Fields connects to your scanner, reads the document, and separates the documents once it detects a new cover sheet. Read more about Quick Fields.

What’s An HR File Cover Sheet?

Many companies have lists of their employees. If you can get this list into a spreadsheet, you can create a cover sheet for each employee the same way you would use a mail merge to create a letter. Since the paper files are stored in alphabetical order, when you do your merge, sort the data the same way your files are organized (by the last name, for example).

When you merge your cover sheet document, the cover sheets are in the order of your files. As a last resort, if you don’t have a way to create a list of your active employees you can just type them in. The benefit is that you only have to do it once, and the names are consistent.

When preparing files for scanning, prep one employee file at a time. Insert the cover sheet for that employee and section on the top of your paper pile. Once you have a stack, you can insert them in the scanner and scan them to Quick Fields, which does the heavy lifting.

Quick Fields:

• Identifies when there is a new document (so you can load the scanner with more than one document at a time)
• Reads the text on the cover page
• Inserts the text into index fields for the document
• Stores the document in Laserfiche and builds the folder structure for you

With Quick Fields, you don’t have to spend time keying in employee names, or manually building folder structures to match your existing HR file structure. You can manage security, and provide access for auditors.  To find out more or discuss cover pages that will work with your capture application, you can contact us.

You can use cover sheet file separation to support a variety of business activities besides HR. We have converted millions of records since 1995 and assisted many more companies in converting their own records. This trick allows you to rapidly convert your documents, and index them with accuracy.

When you reduce the pain of transformation, you can dive into digital business faster.  Still suffering from a paper burden? We’re here to help you determine the best way to move forward. Laserfiche solutions are available for companies of any size, and at any stage of their digital transformation, often for much less than you think. We’d love to discuss what Laserfiche options are suitable for your HR files, or any other file intensive department.

Photo by Brett Sayles from Pexels