Housekeeping of your Documents in Accela

Over the years as we support and add agencies, we have seen all kinds of documents attached to records, from one document to more than a 100+ documents – how you manage all of these documents over the life of the record is very important. Many of the documents that auto-save to the Documents tab on records are considered part of the ‘official’ record.

Some of these auto-saved documents include the Receipt, Invoice, Permit, Temporary Certificate of Occupancy (TCO), and Certificate of Occupancy (C of O). As each of these documents is generated thru a process, sometimes we discover that we missed filling in necessary or required information, forgot to update an address or owner, didn’t edit the Description of Work, etc. Once fixed - particularly for the Permit, TCO, C of O, and CSC - you regenerate the report then from the Record Summary > Reports dropdown. After doing this, it is very important to delete the former incomplete/incorrect copy from Documents given you have now generated a new corrected copy – ideally there should only be one ‘official’ Permit, C of O or CSC, on any given record. Keep in mind that the customer can see Documents on their records thru ACA and when there are multiples of the Permit or other important document – this poses the risk of them pulling an incorrect or inaccurate version of this important document.

When you need to see the Receipt or the Invoice once it’s been generated, go to Documents, locate the document, Actions > Preview. If you go to the Receipt # in the Payments screen or the Invoice # in the Fees screen, and click the link to see them, you are generating another copy of these same documents which could result in multiple copies of the same receipt/invoice in Documents over time. Keep in mind that the receipt is a living document, it will change when any fee included in a particular receipt # is changed such as voiding a paid fee – in this case, generating a new copy of the changed receipt would be necessary. Any documents that are in PDF format can be viewed thru Preview, however other document types will have to be downloaded first thru the Actions menu and viewed in the source application.

For all these reasons and more, good housekeeping of your record documents is a good habit to get into.