LaserVault is an easy-to-use alternative to printing and filing paper reports
Having served Pennsylvania for over 60 years, Waterloo Gardens is one of the top ten garden centers in the country. We talked with Tom Hartman, Director of I.S. for Waterloo Gardens, about the role LaserVault has played in their continuing success.
A simple story
“We’ve been using LaserVault Reports for about nine years,” Tom says. “The support over the years has been excellent. We began using LaserVault straight out of the box and it worked just fine.
“Our needs are fairly simple. We use LaserVault to store transaction registers for auditing purposes. LaserVault is worthwhile just for the auditing purposes alone, that alone pays for it. We were able to cost justify the product well within the first year-and-a-half of use.”
Where do the savings come from?
“The savings come mainly from the cost of paper and the cost of storage space to store the paper,” Tom explains, “Transaction registers for us include items purchased at point of sale, purchase order transaction registers, inventory control transaction registers, and accounts payable transaction registers. There’s at least six different transaction registers in a given day, and they can vary depending upon our season from twenty pages to several hundred pages each.”
Easier audits
“We only need to review the transaction registers in the case of an audit, or when the state comes in to do a sales tax audit. It’s wonderful to be able to go back and get any transaction register without having to dig through boxes and boxes of paper to find the correct one. It’s really a matter of having to search for a needle in a haystack, and having that process automated really helps.
“We’ll put a state sales tax auditor down in front of a terminal, and let them have at it. They can look at all for anything they want to look for, in terms of sales and use tax and what-have-you. Having all of the data right there at a terminal makes things very easy for everyone.”
Reduced risk of fines
“And then, in the case of a sales tax audit, if you’re missing an audit for a particular day, they can fine you for that.” Tom tells us, “Thanks to LaserVault, we can be sure every day is available to us, it’s not like somebody can misfile the transaction register, because they are indexed automatically by the system itself.”
Security of the Documents
“Last January, Waterloo brought back in house its payroll processing for a number of reasons. When they used one of the ‘big’ payroll processors, reports and payroll registers were received on CD’s each week – 2 per week x 52 weeks. Storage of the CD’s was an issue. Now the payroll reports are stored in their own archive in LaserVault and secured so that only authorized staff can access them. Again audits centered around payroll have become much easier.”
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