Community Brands saves money, slashes processing time, and boosts data security with ScaleHub
Customer spotlight:
Community Brands
Industry:
Software Development
Community Brands is the leading provider of cloud-based software for assessing financial aid needs to the nonprofit sector, membership organizations,and private K-12 schools
Every year, Community Brands receives about 1.5 million documents from families applying for financial aid. All of these documents must be processed and verified in order to identify family income and expenses to determine tuition assistance needs.
Bank documents, W2s, demographic forms, 1040s, and mortgage statements are just some of the forms that require processing and verification. The structure of some forms change year-to-year, adding more difficulty to the process, and the documents are full of sensitive, personally identifiable information (PII) like social security numbers and dates of birth.
Additionally, the volume of documents that require processing spikes in the first quarter of every year, as is the cyclical nature of a school year. Craig Dodson, the Director of Financial Aid Solutions at Community Brands, echoed this challenge: “We see a couple different extreme peaks in a year. It’s overwhelming at times the number of forms we work across.”
Because of the data contained on these millions of documents, a high level of security was paramount. “We’re dealing with the most sensitive information that families have,” added Dodson.
The main objective – verifying families’ applications with documentation – had become a lengthy, cumbersome, and expensive process. In addition, the processing accuracy had fallen to a level below Community Brands’ standards, while families’ PII was at risk of exposure.
"We couldn’t staff through our peaks and valleys.”
Craig Dodson,
Director of Financial Aid Solutions, Community Brands
"We couldn’t staff through our peaks and valleys.”
Craig Dodson,
Director of Financial Aid Solutions, Community Brands
In an attempt to keep up with cyclical spikes in volume, Community Brands tried to process the documents in-house and outsource some to a 3rd party vendor for manual processing. But it was still taking 10-12 days just to verify what the families were sending, often draining more resources in the form of administrative fixes and extra call support.
Community Brands needed to adapt,
and so identified three major areas in which to improve:
1. Speed
Before their partnership with ScaleHub, it took Community Brands about two weeks just to verify they had received the correct and most up-to-date documents for each application.
2. Accuracy
Data then needed to be keyed into Community Brands’ systems. When performed manually—one person entering data from one document—it was done with less than 70% accuracy.
3. Privacy
Important and sensitive financial
information was exposed to whomever was tasked with entering the information, compromising the privacy of each family applying for financial assistance.
Community Brands
saves “easily 30%” on data verification costs with ScaleHub
Community Brands selected ScaleHub’s document processing solution for quick and accurate verification of applicants’ financial information. They were able to shorten processing time from two weeks to two days, a huge relief for both families and the financial aid team. As for that extra time? “Our employees were able to focus on direct services to clients,” Dodson said.
The time saved was just one piece; the cost savings was another. One former project manager noted, “We’ve not had to take on the internal costs of hiring someone to do the verification. We’ve saved easily 30% on that part, probably even more than that.”
“Our Q1 still and always will be the busiest time, but with ScaleHub, we don’t feel the same stress, we don’t have the extra work, and we don’t have the extra need for operational resources. All of that has changed.”
a solution for safe and accurate document process automation
Community Brands learned that ScaleHub’s intelligent document processing solution, a combination of AI-based capture and crowdsourcing, offered everything they needed require.
After families upload their documents to the Community Brands portal, here’s what happens:
Classification:
Documents are automatically classified using AI technology
Snippeting:
Utilizing a mix of AI and OCR, selected field data is extracted
Crowd Validation:
Snippeted field data, and not the full document, are delivered individually to crowd contributors to protect data privacy
Data Delivery:
“All data is exported and returned to Community Brands for final processing within just a few hours
the results
Cost:
30% savings, no new hires
Speed:
processing time cut from 2 weeks to 2 days
Accuracy:
improved from
<70% to >99%
Privacy:
snippets ensure safe and secure processing
“ScaleHub fundamentally made us the market leader in financial aid because we hit each objective so clearly, and so above the rest of the market.”
Kendra Foss,
former Product Manager: K12 Financial Aid Solutions, Community Brands
“ScaleHub fundamentally made us the market leader in financial aid because we hit each objective so clearly, and so above the rest of the market.”
Kendra Foss,
former Product Manager: K12 Financial Aid Solutions, Community Brands