User 1

We have revolutionised our workflow. I don’t use that term lightly. In the limited time that we have started using this software our workflow has improved dramatically which has obviously improved our service to the taxpayers.

We have revolutionised our workflow. I don’t use that term lightly. In the limited time that we have started using this software our workflow has improved dramatically which has obviously improved our service to the taxpayers.

For years as an organisation, we have watched the volume of financial transactions per file increase. Whether it’s credit cards or bank statements, there’s more statements per file, more transactions per file and it’s increasing exponentially.

With that the time frames for our file completion have gone up. We watched our service standards to our taxpayers decrease so we asked ourselves why.

The average file that we deal with anywhere in our programme has from 20 to 80 bank accounts. That’s just for one small business file. Now it depends on the complexity of the file but most of these transactions have to be converted to Microsoft Excel for analysis.

So, we went to our front-line staff and we asked them for potential solutions to improve our productivity and one auditor approached our management team and she showed us the raw data from our current network approved software for converting statements to Excel and we were absolutely stunned because even after she had converted the data it was unusable even with a high-resolution scan and it required our auditors to manually fix each transaction or sit there with a keypad for days on end inputting the data manually.

I have done this in the past as well as a front-line staff worker in two divisions, audit and criminal investigations and so we started talking amongst ourselves as managers and said there has to be a better way to do this.

We talked to our criminal investigations division, and we learned that there had been some interest from them previously in Altia software. We asked them to come and show it to us and they came and presented to our senior management team. We moved forward with a trial of this software as a pilot. For months and months, we went through an internal approval process because the software isn’t on our network currently, we got approval to move forward on a standalone environment and in November 2019 we started using it.

With the use of two licenses for the Investigation Toolkit we were able to convert bank statements to Excel instantaneously with near perfect accuracy. In fact, we have been monitoring results and our users time has been improving so obviously the more people that use it the better they get at it. The best time so far that we’ve been measuring is 98 transactions per minute so that’s around 100 transactions that we’re entering from these statements per minute and as we keep using it, it keeps improving. Note that when we’re using this, there’s no waiting for a new macro, there’s no manual entry and there’s no software experts required it’s just front-line users who use it because it’s simple.

The best part about it was that I found it to be extremely user friendly, I wanted to try it myself to see what it would be like, and I wanted to know what the staff were doing. I sat down with a staff member who had used it before for about 30 minutes. She showed me a couple of tricks and I was then able to use this software myself effectively. From an organisational perspective using this software means that we can spend more time on our audit, analysis of our investigations and less time on manual mind-numbing data entry. It means that our staff have the tools they need to serve taxpayers quickly and efficiently. Imagine an auditor or an investigator receiving hundreds of pages of bank credit card transactions and then being able to just convert them instantaneously to excel to work on their analysis and complete their file and focus more on the audit aspects rather than their data entry. Imagine how many more taxpayers could be paid more quickly and efficiently without delay and imagine what the impacts to the various workflows would be to our programmes.

My hope is that as we take our first steps towards a more digital working environment, that our staff will have access to these types of tools because they need to complete their work quickly and efficiently.

User 2

Normally it takes me about two weeks to scan and convert all my bank statements for a single file. With Altia it cut my scanning time in half allowing me to focus on the more important parts of my work.

What makes Altia great is that you can personally select the items that you want to be converted into Excel, as well as set up how you want your data to look before you convert it. This saves a lot of time because with the old system you had no choice but to convert everything including irrelevant stuff such as bank logos which can take a very long time, sometimes up to an hour before you can edit the data further on Excel.

Sometimes we would also need to manually enter the data into Excel since the output may not be usable which delays our work even more. Overall, I think that Altia has made my job easier, and I think it would be great and convenient to have the system over our network so that we can continue our edits and conversion as we work from home or at our clients. It helps get our work done faster leading to timelier services to our clients.

User 3

In anticipation of working from home for an unknown period I figured it would be prudent to make my work digital.

I gave myself one and half days and I was able to convert all of the bank statements from one of my files to Excel. Then I was able to continue working on that case from home. I was only able to do that because I had access to the Altia software. The software was really efficient, and I was very impressed by the effectiveness of

being able to choose what I wanted rather than cutting out all the parts that were really stalling the software before with our other scan software. That was awesome I loved that. Another great thing about using Altia is that when I converted these statements, I had four different institutions to work with and it didn’t matter.

Altia doesn’t restrict you in what you’re trying to do, it’s customisable on the fly which is a huge strength.

My favourite part is that it can be done without the use of any high-speed scanner or special hardware. I don’t think I could go back to the old way truthfully; this is a game changer.