When we took office, there was about a three-week delay in terms of what was publicly available for individuals who were doing searches. So it was very, very important to us to get that number down to less than one day. So we’re very, very proud of that.
But beyond that, obviously, when COVID came along, it was chaos on multiple different fronts. Well, one thing that we ran into immediately was that we found that our leases and our miscellaneous documents weren’t yet digitized. They were in the books here, but we couldn’t have people come in and access the books the way that we wanted. So we immediately undertook the task of digitizing those documents, of getting them online so that individuals who are practitioners or folks who wanted to have access to those documents could have them at their fingertips from the comfort of their home.
I was fortunate enough to be here during implementation of Neumo records. It was a lot, but it was great because Neumo was there with us every step of the way. They guided us on what we needed, what was probably best standards at the time, and they were also adaptable to our workflows and our needs and how our office operated. Training, it was great. They were here for a week and a half, and they walked us through every single process, showed us how things worked, and it gave the staff a good foothold on how to, like, take ownership of the product and really increase our efficiency moving forward.
Working with Neumo has been fantastic. Our IT staff has a tremendous relationship with them. Anytime an issue comes up, it’s addressed quickly. It’s addressed in a professional way. We enjoy interacting with the staff at Neumo. They do a fantastic job of answering any questions we have. And then we’re always excited to see what’s next because we’ve implemented some new technology over the past few years. And, implementing new technology isn’t easy. It’s oftentimes hard, but it’s been as seamless as it could be in working with Neumo and we’re excited about that.
One thing that we did implement was a dashboard for our indexing and verifying staff. And what that dashboard does is it shows the status of documents within our system. We have counters for the scanning queue, the indexing queue, the verifying queue that tell our staff, like, where we need to pinpoint our effort at. So if we have a lot in the indexing queue, we may shift staff over to indexing.
If we have a lot in the verify queue, we may shift staff over there. Then along with that, we also talk about our processing time, and then we also give numbers for our back file work. So our back file work is all documents that are eighteen hundreds that are in physical books that we’re working to digitize so they’re viewable to the public. A lot of that is for historical value, but one of our goals is to have the most complete and accurate search database in the state.
Our relationship with Neumo has been great. Our IT folks are always in constant communication with them. If the website goes down, if there’s an issue, the customer service folks are always available. Our frontline staff will occasionally engage with Neumo, but more importantly individuals in the public. The fact that they can log into our search site, they can see a track record of what they’ve searched. They can find the documents very quickly, but really over these seven or eight years, Neumo has truly adapted with us and implemented a number of measures, a number of reports that have been really, really easy for us. If you talk to auditors’ offices, other recorders’ offices, I don’t think the process is that smooth, and we definitely owe a lot of that to our relationship with Neumo.
