Softology

Saving you time and money.

Rates Management

Would you like to :

  • Utilise Advanced Machine Learning technology to speed through your rates bills at peak periods.
  • Extract your rates bill information for a subsequent automatic import into your rating management software.

Softology Lenses For Rating Systems can automatically recognise rating documents from diverse authorities and match to the correct hereditament. It does not depend on blank page document separators, barcodes, templates, or other separation mechanisms. The Lenses For Rating System searches for matches to the hereditament using a variety of fields and partial fields to identify the best hereditament match from the OCRed data from each rating document.

Lenses For Rating flies through with high volumes of post, especially at busy periods, and streamlines the processing of rates bills from scanning through matching and updating your rating management system. Your rating team will be able to review and approve many rate demands with a single click.

Bill Matching

One of the key problems when processing rates bills is that often the data held within your Rates System differs from the data that appears on the bill. Addresses are different: with certain words or phrases shortened, address lines differ between the data held and the data printed, and sometimes post codes just don’t match. If you were you to OCR the document and attempt a match to your Rating System by other means then the process would often be unsuccessful.

The Lenses For Rating System searches for matches for the rates bill using a variety of fields and partial fields to identify the best hereditament match using the OCR data. It then suggests to the user the best hereditament match, but also provides a list of the next 20 best matches. Most of the time the system’s best hereditament match will be the correct match. On the rare occasions when this isn’t the case the user will simply click on one of the other possible matches to process that bill.

Since Version 2, Lenses For Rating may also be configured to provide automated processing where the best matches are automatically processed and updated on your Rates System for payment. If you prefer a more hands on approach, it can also be configured to process in a semi-automated way where the user can verify the match and data before your Rates System is updated. This may need to be done where the data extracted from the scanned bill is not sufficiently accurate for automated matching.

Improved Throughput

Lenses For Rating improves the capture and validation of data, utilising data directly from your Rates System. We use as much data as possible to validate data fields and identify a match in your Rates System. A considerable time saving is achieved when compared to the time taken to perform manual look-ups to find account numbers or hereditament references. Lenses For Rating will also save a significant amount of time in the manual entry of data.

Lenses For Rating handles total amount bill matching and instalment payments. Revised bills can also be processed, and it has the optional facility to apply notes to any transaction.

Version 2 of Lenses For Rating offers automated matching according to validation rules, so that you may action large volumes of automatically matched bills. The data may be fed into your Rating software.

Installations

Our first installation of Lenses was at a global leader in commercial real estate services operating in 66 countries with global turnover of $1.7 billion. They have 10 UK offices.

The client uses Softology Lenses For Rating within their rates department to process customers' rate demands. They are able to scan documents without batching the work by client and without the need for page separators.

Our system

  • processes each page
  • separates bills
  • identifies clients and transactions
  • automatically captures all the required data
  • matches it to the estimated rate demands

The estimated rate demands are held on their River Lake Rating System, allowing the rating team to review and approve rate demands with a single click.

Our second client to install Lenses For Rating is a leading multi-disciplinary property consultancy with 7 UK offices. They use it to capture and export data their Kinspeed Rates System and Document Management System.

We also used different data in our data capture routines, so screen layouts and database were changed.

Due to the modular nature of the Lenses For Rating platform, changes can be implemented without the need to change the core Lenses System. This provides a very flexible solution that can be tailored to the specific requirements of a client.

River Lake

We have integrated the Softology Lenses For Rating System into the River Lake Software Ltd Rates System. We use data from River Lake Software Ltd to build tables to help validate the data capture and we have developed an on-line interface with their system to match and edit data to help ensure that more transactions are processed automatically. Data from the Rates System is imported into Lenses For Rating and assembled into a structured data set which is then used by several in-house algorithms to match a bill to the correct hereditament record. Changes to hereditament records within the Rates System are automatically imported into Lenses to ensure that scanned documents are matched against the most recent set of data.

Softology have worked with River Lake Software Ltd for a number of years and initially had a simple interface from their system into the Softology Document Management System. However, during the course of the last 3 years our relationship has become much stronger and we have built a new interface from their system directly into our Document Management System. This has also allowed us to populate tree index structures in the Document Management System.

Kinspeed

We have integrated the Softology Lenses For Rating System into the Kinspeed System. We use data from Kinspeed Ltd to build tables to help validate the data capture and we have developed an on-line interface with their system to match and edit data to help ensure that more transactions are processed automatically.

You will get