Why it pays for tax offices to use an advanced cash and check scanner with remote deposit capture.

For any county treasurer's office, collecting property taxes is an important part of the job. Those taxes come from home owners in different forms, mainly checks and cash, and depending on how big and how populated the county is, they could be looking at processing payment funds from hundreds of thousands of homeowners, if not more, each year.

Manual processing of these operations can cause significant problems and headaches for treasury offices, including:

• Human error, causing bank adjustments and the fees that go with them.
• Excessive processing time for treasury staff.
• Courier services costs, or the cost of staff taking deposits to the bank.

All of this can result in a business-as-usual situation of next-day deposits, which can cause a county to lose interest revenues.

So, what's the solution? For many treasury offices, including the Lake County Illinois Treasury Office, it's technology. Everyone, not just governmental offices, needs to figure out how to do more with less, maximize efficiency and cut down on staff time doing labor-intensive tasks that could best be done by a machine.

An advanced cash and check scanning machine can process hundreds of checks per minute, capture them and send them directly to the bank for deposit. It sounds like a no-brainer, and an investment that will produce ROI in no time. Some of the features to look for in a check scanner include:

Speed. Your scanner needs to process hundreds, if not thousands, of checks per minute.

Image quality. Speed is great, but if your images aren't clear and readable, errors will still occur. If anything does need to be corrected, you've got the image right there to quickly discern if there's a problem.

Remote deposit capture. This is a crucial feature, allowing you to send those deposits electronically to the bank.

Cash counting capabilities. Checks aren't the only currency homeowners use to make deposits. As property tax time comes around, offices can be inundated with people bringing in cash to cover amounts that can stretch into the thousands. It's crucial for cashiers to count that money quickly and give homeowners a receipt in minutes.