Educational institutions today have more administrative work and putting a squeeze on resources due to increasing student number, applications and compliance requirements. Pressure due to tight operating budgets, increased government regulation, increased demand for financial aid, and shrinking government funds, and at the same time, an increasing number of students are applying for admission and financial aid.
“The students and their parents expect a rapid feedback on applications, convenient submittal processes and an accurate recording of information.”
Admissions, Financial aid, Transcripts, Test Scores/Assessment and Billing departments have a tremendous amount of information coursing through their offices, and often have very strict time frames in which all these documents must be processed. The time and labour intensive process of handling paper-based operations results in limited accountability and process bottleneck. Without an efficient, automated solution in place, the task of processing this information can lead to excessive costs and lengthy response times.
You can effectively and efficiently meet this increased demand with document capture and document process automation. By automating manually intensive processes, educational institutions can be more productive with fewer resources. The ability to bring information online enables these organizations to serve their students and faculty faster with more accurate, up-to-date information.
Applications forms represent a challenging business processes within higher education. The application process must be available to all students, both in electronic and paper form, and each application must be reviewed to ensure receipt of all required documents. Frequently, the submitted applications are incomplete and require that students be contacted for more information. Each application marks the start of a new student record at the educational institution to which the student has applied. During the life cycle of this record, various departments, including registrar, financial aid, academic advisement, athletics, honors programs, and alumni relations may require access to it and may add new files. And this record can include a variety of documents in addition to the application, such as transcripts, exam scores, letters of recommendation, student records, tax forms, financial aid requests, and other supplemental materials.
Many large public school systems have the challenging task of managing, maintaining and providing for large groups of teachers, administrators and students. By converting paper forms to electronic versions, schools are able to realize substantial savings by eliminating the cost of printing, distributing and shipping paper forms. The electronic submission of the form not only speeds up the approval, but also allows the individual and other affected departments, such as the finance department, to track where the form is in the approval process. By having access to this information, the person submitting the form can immediately know when the action will be taken, and the finance department can make better budget projections based on the number and monetary value of forms currently being approved across the organization. Both 
Scoring and assessments are critical to any educational institution. Automated scoring provides fast, accurate results that can can be posted for student feedback as well as for reporting to governmental organizations. Most of the educational institute today still manually enter test and survey data at substantial cost and error rates. Use 
Most educational institutions need to gain control over the massive influx of paper forms and documents that can overwhelm and impede the productivity of the organization, increase costs and raise error rates. 
A large educational institute has hundreds of forms for their organizational processes, including student applications, financial aid forms, time sheets, HR forms, time-off requests, grant application and other forms exist in different formats, some on paper, some electronic. It is difficult for students and employees to find the right form, and once found they need different applications to open and fill out the forms. To process the forms, students and employees print and submit them via expensive overnight mail. The overall process is time consuming, inefficient, expensive and error prone. Plus, there is no way to track progress in real time.
