Gibson Booth Business Solutions and Insolvency offers proactive business solutions and insolvency services to businesses and individuals that are facing financial difficulties. The company's staff have an in-depth knowledge of the issues involved, and can offer expert guidance and support at this crucial time. Gibson Booth works with a range of businesses and individuals across the UK, including many SMEs and owner-managed businesses, as well as larger organisations.

The uncertain economic climate presented the firm with a challenge to ensure their business and employees are working as efficiently as possible to continue to thrive and grow.

Ted Wetton is the managing director for Gibson Booth based in Barnsley, South Yorkshire. He set up the insolvency wing of the business in 1992 and now has 12 employees, all qualified Insolvency Practitioners or carry the Certificate of Proficiency in Insolvency. Ted has pinpointed a number of areas in his business that help them to achieve their goals:

• Increase return on investment by implementing best of breed systems
• Utilise systems to provide seamless workflows and processes to serve clients more efficiently
• Increase employee satisfaction with flexible remote working

PUSH FOR CHANGE
Although Gibson Booth have been paperless since 2001 they decided their existing document management system was becoming too expensive, and wasn't giving them the return they were looking for. It was time to seek out an alternative that could offer them more for their investment.

Ted looked around the market and arranged meetings with 5 different document management providers, and commented: "The one that shone in a meeting with 6 of my senior staff, the one we couldn't trip up, and had everything we wanted, was Virtual Cabinet."

PAPER FILING AND REAL ESTATE
Like most established businesses, Gibson Booth required an ever-increasing amount of storage space to house paper files. Resulting in lost floor space and high costs to the business. Creating digital copies of all their files has meant huge savings on storage bills, as Ted commented: "Since we went paperless, we managed to empty the equivalent of a terraced house full of paper - which is now rented out and saved us an enormous cost."

The benefits of digitising all their files wasn't limited to saving on real estate costs. Ted has realised that a huge amount of time is also saved through improved efficiency in locating the documents now kept within the system - allowing Gibson Booth to serve their clients in a timelier manner.

"A major benefit is the time it takes to retrieve and see a document; the average time is approximately 5 or 6 seconds," explains Ted. "When we do an investigation, we will put part of the books of the insolvent company on to Virtual Cabinet. One of the biggest benefits of that is if we have to analyse bank statements, we can search for anything we want, for example a name, an account number, a type of transaction and so on."

TRANSITION TO DIGITAL
When the firm started capturing digital copies of their paper files, they used photocopiers with incorporated scanners, but found these to be slow and clunky. They were also not practical for staff due to the number and their location.

To speed up this process Ted made the decision to move to fast, compact Fujitsu desktop scanners: "We advanced to putting on everyone's desk a Fujitsu fi-7160, which is a very small scanner, a multi-sheet feed colour scanner which scans both sides. If someone is working remotely from home their post is scanned in and sent directly to their in-tray. Long term it has saved us space, but the major benefit is the cost of time to find papers on the file. You can't lose a document once you've scanned it in, and from the viewpoint of compliance - there are no lost documents."

With duplex scanning speeds of 120 images per minute at 300 dpi, the fi-7160 protects Gibson Booth's documents with acoustic sensors, ensures that data is captured with smart ultrasonic technology, and reduces rescans by cleaning up their documents automatically in a single pass. Reliability is enhanced even further with new skew prevention technology for exceptional paper handling.

COMPLEMENTARY SOFTWARE
Finding systems that complemented the business and could integrate seamlessly with each other was key to ensuring workflows and processes are effective and easy for the staff to adopt.

Ted started using Turnkey's IPS system in 1992 and had a pre-existing file structure that worked for his business and IPS. When he chose to implement Virtual Cabinet it was imperative that it could mirror that structure, as he explains: "When we adopted IPS we kept their structure of 1 to 25 index with approx. 8 to 10 indexing inside each section.So that's what we went with and we haven't changed that, so our paper files were the same as the files in Virtual Cabinet."

SECURE INFORMATION TRANSFER
With privacy regulations being a hot topic for the last few years Gibson Booth is acutely aware of the importance of sending information securely. The use of portals is becoming increasingly required so Gibson Booth in fact adopted two. Both the Virtual Cabinet and IPS Portals have become essential tools to eliminate the use of email to transfer sensitive information and request electronic signatures.

"You don't have to worry about GDPR as much if you're using the Virtual Cabinet Portal," explained Ted. "I consider it confidential between myself and the client I'm sending documents to. The Turnkey portal is excellent, creditors can put reports and their claims on there which frees up a lot of time."

Work life balance and employee wellness are paramount at Gibson Booth. Being able to provide flexible remote working and have access to the tools needed to complete the work is key, as Ted concludes: "The main benefit of Virtual Cabinet is that I can be anywhere, and I can get into all my files, via the app or my laptop. My staff can work from home as if they were in the office and had the physical file there, which has improved staff working life. Staff can work more flexi-hours and can work from home. By having Virtual Cabinet they virtually have all the filing cabinets sat on their desk at home, so they can operate just as if they were in the office."
More info: www.virtualcabinet.com