The Christensen name has been associated with heating and cooling since the 1920s and Appleton, Wisconsin-based Christensen & Wisnet has kept its flawless reputation by providing top-notch service. But an overwhelming pile of paperwork was literally tripping up its employees on their way to keeping customers cool.
For Christensen & Wisnet having organized and easily accessible files wasn’t an option; it was a necessity. “In the heating and cooling industry you’ve got piles and piles of invoices,” said Dan Christensen, the company’s IT operations manager. His company, he explained, can have up to seven techs out, making up to 10 calls per day. Each call requires a lot of paperwork. “Install invoices can have 40 pages. And we’ve got piles of delivery slips,” he claimed. And, as an added inconvenience, all the filing was done in the center of the office, so oftentimes employees would have to walk around stacks of paper.
He estimated that two months’ worth of calls would take one employee an entire week to file, especially since he or she would have to create folders and label them. Since the company did not have a full-time person to do the job, the responsibility often fell to techs who weren’t out on calls. “We were paying them the same wages for their skills so we were throwing money out the window,” Christensen explained. “One of the install techs filed for three weeks straight. Then he told us where his son works, everything is paperless.”
With only one exception, Christensen and his co-workers were excited to go paperless. But that one reluctant service manager who was used to tracking his service calls manually only got sold on the idea once he was shown how the easy-to-use product would allow users to annotate on the documents and e-mail them. “He finally turned his opinion on it,” Christensen said. “Once he liked it, things rolled just fine.”
The company had typed all its invoices into QuickBooks notating the type of service performed, but needed PaperSave’s ScanNow feature to keep the files updated. “We looked at a few options. We were even thinking about developing our own because I do have a background in developing and databases,” Christensen explained. “But why waste the time? After I saw this I said there’s no contest—especially for the price point and the features that you’re getting. It’s a no-brainer to choose PaperSave. Probably within one or two months it will already pay for itself.”
Christensen was especially impressed when he learned that PaperSave allows users to customize additional fields and configure in the management console. He also liked that every bit of information is live and that PaperSave allows him to attach scanned copies of customers’ checks to documents in QuickBooks.
His company also runs numerous other businesses, ranging from a real estate brokerage to a petroleum tank construction company, and PaperSave helps link all information together. Just months after installing PaperSave, Christensen said the HVAC business—and some of the others—will be entirely paperless going forward.