Augsburg College Increases Productivity of Financial Aid Office with Document and Image Management from HelpSystems

Keeping Up with Paperwork Was Impossible

Augsburg’s financial aid offices processes 20,000 documents of paperwork each year—and a third of these are returned for correction and resubmitted.

It’s up to Sue Copus—Office Manager for the Financial Aid Office—and five work study students to collect and verify the three basic documents that determine each student’s eligibility:

• The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA)
• Tax form(s) or a verification worksheet (provided by the Financial Aid Office)
• Special circumstance letter (if necessary)

Document volumes vary during the school year, with the busiest of five peak periods coming in preparation for new students in the fall. And these documents could arrive in any number of ways, from mail, fax, or drop-off at the Financial Aid Office.

From there, documents were sorted and information was verified and manually entered into their financial aid software. Then, documents were filed in tubs by student’s last initial. Finding them after filing them could take 20 minutes per document.

After these documents are filed, a “Pre-Award New Student Report” is run to inform staff which students have completed the paperwork.

It’s no wonder that keeping up was impossible.

How Augsburg Saves Time Every Day

The “Pre-Award New Student Report” is now created daily, and it only takes ten minutes—versus four hours before Webdocs.

And, instead of enlisting five work study students, Copus only needs to enlist two.

Now that student documents are store electronically, enrollment counselors can respond to student inquiries faster. Before, it took these counselors a long time to find student documents. Today, they can find documents in a snap.