Jacobus Energy has been providing petroleum products to its customers since 1919. Today, Jacobus Energy is a complete energy company, providing heating and cooling, commercial fueling and environmental services. We talked with David Schier about how LaserVault Reports helps Jacobus Energy manage its invoices.

Find invoices faster and easier

“What’s great about LaserVault Reports,” David says, “Is that it really makes it easier to find invoices.

“Primarily what we store in LaserVault are duplicate copies of all of our invoicing for all of our businesses. There are also some reports in there, but our department deals primarily with invoices. Five of us in our department use LaserVault on a regular basis, and then two others use it occasionally. Company-wide, I’d say about thirty people total use LaserVault Reports.”

Missing invoices no longer a problem

“The manager and all my people, we probably use LaserVault Reports more than anybody else because we get so many requests for missing invoices. It depends on how many collection calls they are making, and whether or not the invoices have mailing problems, but you can get anywhere from a couple up to a hundred invoice request per day within the department. Some days are just terrible, if the invoices for some reason didn’t get mailed, customers will start calling us up and requesting copies to be sent to them, and then you just keep making them. “

Better than microfiche

“Basically, LaserVault Reports replaced the microfiche system that we had. Years ago when you had to go through the microfilm files and get an invoice printed out, you’d spend a lot of time just finding where the invoice was, and then you’d print it, and it’d be a terrible copy. Now, I can go in and find just about any invoice in the system and have it printed out in a few minutes.

“The invoices are vital,” David says. “We’re always going in to LaserVault to find the invoices, print them, and get them sent out to the customer. Usually we’re looking for one invoice, but occasionally, we’ll have to look for a block of invoices. We tend to do our searches based on customer account number and account names, or we’ll do searches on invoice numbers.”

15 minutes to learn the system

“As an end user, I think the system is easier than what we had before, especially now that it is on the web. We’ve been using the web-based version for six months now. It takes 15 minutes or so to train someone on how to use LaserVault. It helps to identify what you’re looking for, but there is the option to search across invoice types if all else fails. All in all, it really isn’t too hard to train for or to use.”