Over the past decade, Millennia Group has been involved in many large real estate developments around the country. We support the developer’s construction loan funding process. The simple explanation is that we help gather, organize and submit a digital copy of all the documentation that the bank requires before funding each construction loan draw request. These requests typically occur monthly.
The actual process is far more complicated and in fact is a marriage of documentation and data. This process happens to be one of the best examples of how document scanning married with data creates an incredibly powerful tool. In fact this should be the number one rule in document scanning.
In the construction loan funding example, the power comes from matching each scanned invoice to the correct construction budget line item. Being able to see the budget for each draw request and then immediately drill down to the supporting invoices is very powerful.
Other common examples of this marriage of data and documents include; lease documents tied to the building and tenant list, vendor contracts tied to the vendor list, employee files tied to the employee list and engineering drawings tied to the project list. When the documents are tied to the source list, searches are enhanced by the availability of additional data in the list and documents don’t get lost due to spelling errors or naming issues.
If you include the tenant name, square footage and lease end date in a tenant list, that information becomes searchable. When lease documents are searchable by the tenant list, the search can find all documents for tenants with greater than 5,000 square feet or leases for all tenants expiring in the next 90 days. Having this marriage also allows you to look for exceptions. Do you have documents for every employee in the list? Very powerful.
We always recommend that a scanning project include a marriage of documents and data and all document imaging systems should maintain this data relationship at all times. The data relationship also ensures that new documents added to the system match known data. As an example, you cannot add a vendor contract for a name that is not in the approved vendor list. Either the list is out of date or the vendor name in the contract doesn’t match the name in your source system. This data matching relationship will help keep your documents organized and a trusted system of record.
If your company has difficulty finding your scanned documents, please contact us, we can help. 