We thought we would lighten up our blog topics over the holiday and provide our readers with an entertaining approach to describing some of the many features available with Cogent.
Top 10 Reasons to Purchase Cogent in 2010
#1. Your entire collection department pool s their money to buy a weekly lottery tickets. Yesterday they won $378 million dollars. None of them showed up to work today.
How Cogent can help: Training an entire newly hired collection department with your existing software will take weeks! Think of all those hard-to-find screens where you store key bits of information and the fields that you have re-used to store data that has no real home in your current system! With Cogent, your new collection staff could be trained in a matter of hours - not days. Key information is on one screen and more detailed information is only one click away using intuitive navigation to the appropriate screen. Thousands of custom data fields with meaningful labels and descriptions are also available.
#2. The stacks of boxes of filed documents in your document storage / archival room caused you to fail a recent OSHA inspection and you now must consider moving to larger office space to handle the ever-growing volume of paper. Worse yet, your Administrative Assistant went into the storage room 3 days ago to get copies of documents needed for a court hearing today and hasn't been seen since.
How Cogent can help: Documents generated from Cogent are automatically stored and are easily accessed anytime afterwards from a link on the claim. Documents created outside of Cogent can be easily scanned in and associated with the claim so they are only a mouse-click away.
#3. Your top three Senior Paralegals can no longer see their monitors through all the post-it notes they've attached to help track recent changes to the statute of limitations laws in order to calculate the statute date. They are now requesting 19" monitors so they will have more room to attach their post-its.
How Cogent can help: Cogent calculates the Statute of Limitations for you! You define timeframes by state, debt type, documentation type and other factors in an easy to use table. Each firm can identify the order or priority of the various dates that should be used in calculating the statute date such as, charge off date, date last payment made to client, etc. Cogent then has all the information required to correctly and consistently calculate the statute of limitation for you and even updates the statute date when specific key events occur (payments, updated charge-off date, etc).
#4. The legal secretary in your new Arizona office has been unexpectedly unavailable the last several weeks - something about appearing on various talk shows commenting on a relationship she had with a world-renowned golfer. The legal secretary in your Nevada office doesn't understand the process for filing a default judgment in Arizona. Things are backing up and your clients are getting irate!
How Cogent can help: Cogent's powerful Rules Engine allows you to automate state-specific workflow processes. It's easy for the staff to handle multiple states without being overwhelmed with memorizing state-specific logic. With Cogent, you can easily adjust to unplanned situations that take key employees out of the office.
#5. Last month you completed your long-awaited move to a new office. The entire staff has been caught up in setting up their new workspaces with pictures of family, favorite sports teams and celebrities. Unfortunately your office manager forgot to notify the Post Office of your change of address until 2 days ago. The good news is that thousands of debtor payment checks arrived in today's mail. The bad news is it will take several days to enter all of these payments and month-end is tomorrow.
How Cogent can help: Cogent offers an integrated check scanning solution. Just load the checks into the scanner and as long as you have previously received a check from this account Cogent can associate a debtor with the payment - drastically reducing the amount of time it takes to post thousands of payments.
#6. Conversations around the office water cooler have really picked up lately. No doubt about it - the arrest of that attorney your firm hired six months ago on embezzlement charges has given everyone a lot to talk about. You're sure going to miss attending those great parties he threw not to mention paying golf at that international country club. But the hardest thing about his termination from the firm will be telling the two legal secretaries who spent three weeks updating hundreds of documents to add his name to letterheads, signature lines and court documents that the documents will all need to be updated again.
How Cogent can help: The power and agility of Cogent's Rules Engine extends to the integrated Document Maintenance feature. Commonly used text (like in a Letterhead) can be created once and swapped into a document by simply referencing the name of the stored text. Rules can even be applied to vary the text that is inserted (e.g., If court is in NY, insert NY attorney signature line; If claim type is auto loan, insert auto loan language in Complaint).
#7. In an effort to curb costs for this year's annual holiday party you decided to hold the event in your office rather than renting a room at the nearby hotel's conference center. Sadly, using your accountant's PC as a stand for the punch bowl proved to be a mistake when things got a little rowdy while playing Pin the Tail on the Reindeer. Among other files that can no longer be retrieved from her soggy system is the one that tracked all of the upcoming phone checks for debtor payment plans.
How Cogent can help: As payment plan arrangements are entered in Cogent, all of the information for the upcoming payments is stored. On a daily basis, you only need to click a link in Posting to pull in all scheduled payments (phone checks, EFTs and credit cards payments) and initiate the processes that will apply them to the accounts and generate the files for bank processing. Cogent offers an integrated scheduled payment solution that is simple and secure. It also allows you to forecast future revenue payments.
#8. Your new legal secretary has been diligently updating your calendar with all of your appointments: Client Meetings, Bar Association luncheons, etc. Unfortunately no one told her that when entering court hearings for you she also needed to schedule time beforehand to prepare for the hearings. You're due at court in 30 minutes and have done no preparation for three hearings scheduled for today.
How Cogent can help: Cogent has an integrated court calendar eliminating the need to maintain court docket information in a separate system. As hearings are scheduled directly into Cogent, tasks to prepare for the event beforehand and tasks to enter the results of the hearing afterwards can also be automatically scheduled based on the timeframes that you define. A calendar for all or selected courts and attorneys is easily available to be viewed and printed.
#9. Your ongoing conflict with other senior management at the firm regarding your pet initiative for the tuition reimbursement program seemed to be settling down. Although some of the Firm Management had originally been concerned about the cost, during the Quarterly Directors Meeting held last week there appeared to be consensus that the level of professionalism and the improved productivity from the employees participating in the program has been beneficial to the firm. Now you're wondering how to break the news that the manager of your Garnishment Department just informed you that she has passed the Bar Exam and is leaving to start her own Law Firm. Worse yet, she is taking your entire Garnishment Department with her as her new staff.
How Cogent can help: With a couple clicks the outstanding garnishment queue (new garns, renewals, etc.) can easily be reassigned to your superstar paralegals or to another department to keep the processes moving. Even claims that were "owned" by the Garnishment Department can easily be identified and reallocated to current staff through Auto Assignment.
#10. You've successfully landed a new client and they placed a record number of new accounts with your firm. Due to the critical importance of pleasing this new client, you've incented Fred and Bill (your IT Support staff) to stay in the office until all of these claims are successfully loaded. The import process ran for 2 days before encountering an error with several of the files that brought the process to a halt. Though Bill and Fred are fairly certain they will be able to restart the process within the next 24 hours, others in the office are now complaining about the sleeping bags in the break room and the smelly pizza boxes lining the hallway.
How Cogent can help: Cogent's import process can handle in minutes what might take hours in another system. It also incorporates a sophisticated "discard" process that allows properly formatted placements to be imported and discards those with errors. After the errors are corrected, the entire file can be re-imported and Cogent will process the corrected placements and ignore the files that were previously imported.