Filing & recording statements is a tiresome yet crucial function of plan administration. It requires collecting monthly, quarterly, and annual statements for each of the TPAs client’s employees from many different investment providers in a variety of formats. This includes possibly downloading statements from online portals like John Hancock, receiving statements via email, and the most painful – scanning in statements received through paper mail.

Let’s focus on the most time-consuming, error-prone, and incredibly boring method: Physical mail. We live in a world of technology, email, and digital documents, but many institutions still insist on sending documents in the most inefficient and environmentally unfriendly manner.

Monthly mail from an investment provider, like Fidelity and Ameriprise, may include statements for many different employees who have investments through them. Typically, financial institutions sort the statements by account numbers and split them up into individual account statements. Each account is then looked up on PensionPro, the leading practice management tool for retirement plan administrators to find internal plan identifiers and the client directory location on the secure network drive. Statements are then scanned individually and saved in the client directory. Normally, client directories are organized by plan years, accounts, and other fields.

Manually reading and sorting documents - whether physical paper documents or even digital documents is slow, and it sure isn’t fun! Having to go through ten thousand (or more!) pages each month takes up a lot of your work week. Such tedious and repetitive tasks have been shown to increase the chances for human error during sorting or filing. In fact, during early usability and functionality tests with Stax.ai, the automation exposed a lot of incorrectly filed statements from before!

Additionally, once the documents are manually filed, they are either stored or shredded, and the digital files are renamed and moved to the right location. More opportunities for human error.

Imagine if you could just scan all of the statements that come in together, in one go, and you don’t have to worry about anything else. Some magical tool sorts the scanned files, splits up the statements by individual accounts, and files them all in the right place. Then if it’s not sure where something goes or if a client directory doesn’t exist, it lets you know instead of just guessing and making a mistake.

Imagine how much time and money that would save you!

Imagine how many more clients your TPA business could take on!

Imagine how much happier your employees would be not having to do such menial, repetitive, mind-numbing tasks!

Well, this is now possible using modern artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Stax.ai uses AI to “read” the information on the statements, find the account numbers and look up the plan identification and client directory, and finally, file the statements in the right locations. Stax.ai has built-in workflow automation tools which seamlessly integrate with PensionPro to fit into your existing workflows.

The bulk paper statements can be scanned using an automatic document feeder. If your scanner supports scanning to email, then you can have the statements go to an email which Stax.ai syncs with. If not, just scan to your computer and upload the scanned file into your Stax.ai account.

Now, let's say you’ve just added a few new clients (great job!!) this month and they’re not set up on PensionPro yet. When you upload statements for these clients, Stax.ai will let you know that it couldn’t find their client directories on PensionPro. It won’t attempt to file these into the wrong folders, it will wait until you create the plan accounts and then put them there. This is also the case if Stax.ai wasn’t able to clearly read the account numbers on the statements (rarely a problem unless the statements are smudged or your scanner is ancient, in which case that’s something you should consider taking care of!). It will flag these statements so you can handle them manually.

By using automation to handle more than 95% of the statements it's confident in, your employees who have human intelligence and decision-making abilities don’t need to waste their time on repetitive processes. Furthermore, by only spending time on a few, unique or exceptional cases, they are not fatigued and can deliver higher accuracy and overall work quality.

To explore using Stax.ai to automate your statements workflow, click here to schedule a free demo or send an email to david@stax.ai. We start off with a free business solution consultation during which we can discuss the unique needs of your TPA business and how we can optimize this solution for your specific workflow(s).

If you decide to move forward, our onboarding team, led by your dedicated account manager, will set up your account, help you configure your PensionPro account to integrate with Stax.ai, and work with you or your IT team to connect to your secure network drive.

On your part, you’d need to ensure your PensionPro plans are fully up to date and include account numbers within Investments. We can help you do this as well if you need!

Once set up, we can try a few statements to make sure everything works correctly and then you can start using it for your statements workflow. We enter into a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that guarantees you security, availability, and service requirements for your account.

In addition to saving a ton of time, money and headache, Stax.ai also indexes all the information in the statements making them fully searchable. For instance, if you want to find all Wells Fargo statements for a specific employee (say Mark Bennett), you can just search for “Mark Bennett Wells Fargo” and it will bring up all of the statements immediately! You don’t need to find the plan identifier and go into the client directory to look for the statements. You can also search by plan year, specific amounts, and more!

Bonus workflow!

Convert your scanned paper statements into Excel spreadsheets to reconcile information for your clients faster! Contact us to learn more about this use case.

Get started!

So schedule a free consultation or send an email to david@stax.ai to take your first step into automating your statements workflow and growing your TPA!