""I don't think there is a feature in Nitro PDF Professional that we aren't utilizing somewhere."
Garrett Martin
Director of Technology Services
Johnson, Price and Sprinkle

The problem

North Carolina-based Johnson, Price and Sprinkle offers over a half century of CPA service, managing over fifty employees located across three offices. The firm faced significant challenges and expense in document management.

"Moving from a paper workflow to an electronic document workflow was the only way to keep up with the firm's growth and document retention requirements," said Garrett Martin, Director of Technology Services at JPS.

Paper is easily lost, damaged or destroyed, and storing large volumes of paper documents is cumbersome, expensive and ill-suited to document searches.

JPS was also struggling with efficiently moving files and supporting papers to other offices. "Without electronic documents, it was very hard to shift work around to other offices because the supporting paper would have to be physically shipped from one office to another," said Martin.

Johnson, Price and Sprinkle had to find an document interchange format to replace paper. The firm identified PDF as its format of choice and then began evaluating PDF software that could provide powerful features to create, markup, edit, view, sort, and index search its documents.

"We went through an exhaustive evaluation process to find a "back-end" system that fit our needs, and then had to find "front end" tools for our staff to use," said Martin.

"Our main goal was not to introduce complexity by using several different tools."

Other important considerations JPS wanted addressed by a solution were:

• PDF document production flexibility in scanning and printing capabilities.
• Easy template editing including watermarking and header/footer controls.
• Powerful PDF markup and commenting tools.
• Full sorting, indexing and search capabilities.

The solution

Upon deciding to deploy Nitro PDF Professional, JPS wanted to be certain that implementation went as smoothly as possible during the initial rollout of the software. Support was an important consideration when the company had evaluated the Nitro PDF Software offering, as the firm has a diverse range of document creation and manipulation needs.

"We have several different departments which produce documents in very different ways.Audits, for example, generate documents that consist of scanned supporting documents, spreadsheets, word processor documents, and document indexes used to link all of these together," noted Martin.

The company evaluated several different tools and found that most were too complicated, too expensive or too resource-intensive for "across the board" implementation. In addition, one of the more pressing internal concerns was how to quickly train staff while transitioning from paper to electronic document processes efficiently.

"The implementation of Nitro PDF Professional went very smoothly. Of all the changes introduced with our document management system, Nitro Pro was the easiest for our employees to deal with. Nitro Pro's interface is clean and simple, allowing people to work instead of train," says Martin.

Johnson, Price and Sprinkle employees were able to use Nitro PDF Professional immediately without any training downtime.

Results

Finding the right PDF creator and editor was essential to the success of Johnson, Price and Sprinkle's long-term commitment to its employees, clients and CPA service industry requirements.

"We found that Nitro PDF Professional had the power to be useful, while also being the easiest to use. The initial cost of Nitro Pro was a huge plus, and we continue to recommend Nitro Pro to other firms," Martin says.

Nitro PDF Professional has also played an integral part in the firm's expansion from its own offices to its clients' offices, allowing for more client and company security, archival and document exchange.

Clients are also learning new, convenient ways to share files and collaborate using PDF electronically, notes Martin.

Nitro PDF Software has provided Johnson, Price and Sprinkle with a robust and scalable PDF creation and collaboration solution.

With the deployment of Nitro PDF Professional, JPS was able to:

• Successfully transition document workflows from paper to digital, saving time and money.
• Easily move large volumes of documents between locations securely, and retain document integrity.
• Provide reliable and powerful scan-to-PDF functionality to the firm's team.
• Encourage internal and external document collaboration via PDF.
• Save thousands of dollars in printing, faxing, paper and document archival costs.