TEA Winner 2022: Oklahoma County Clerk's Office

• Industry: County Government
• Location: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
• Number of Employees: 42
• Population: 804,275
• Tyler Client Since: 2020
• Tyler solutions used: Records Management and Recording Access

Challenges

When a new Oklahoma County Clerk was elected in 2016, a goal was set to bring the Clerk’s Office into the 21st century. Unfortunately, their antiquated software system was preventing this goal from becoming a reality.

Filers who wanted to record documents electronically had to first enter a Memorandum of Understanding and an ACH payment disclaimer to submit documents and payments. This process was impractical for customers who didn’t file frequently, they had to either mail a document or drive to downtown Oklahoma City to record the documents in person. A trip to the office also meant constituents had to pay for parking and go through security.

Staff also experienced several in-office challenges with the previous software. To access specific workflows, they had to open multiple apps to find information. And the indexing of documents required a significant amount of data entry and was time-consuming.

To address these challenges they needed a flexible, user-friendly, and fully integrated software solution that would allow for credit card payments to improve the overall experience for their staff and constituents.

Solution

Oklahoma County was looking for a software solution that included:

• A workflow process for receipting, recording, and indexing
• A dashboard that would allow administrators to monitor a document through the workflow process
• The ability for constituents to record documents electronically and pay via credit card or electronic check
• An OCR option for indexing

The county chose Tyler’s Records Management and Recording Access to modernize their office. The flexibility of the solutions allowed them to select the options that worked best for them. And it could accommodate constituents wishing to use the website portal to file documents electronically and pay via credit card or electronic check.

Results

With these new solutions in place, Oklahoma County has transformed the efficiency and productivity of their office. Constituents can now electronically submit documents for recording directly to the county using a web portal accessible anywhere with internet access. The process can be initiated 24/7, and the documents are recorded by staff during regular business hours. Staff can complete the process with less data entry and are able to access all the tools they need within a unified system.

In the first five weeks after they went live, 5,400 of the 14,000 electronic documents recorded were filed by constituents using Recording Access, a share they expect will only grow over time. More than 1,100 of those constituents used an electronic check or credit card and the remainder used ACH payments.

The county has also simplified their scanning and indexing processes with the software’s intelligent indexing feature.

Letty Black, real estate/UCC supervisor of the Oklahoma County Clerk’s Office, explains, “Before we had OCR, our indexers had to index specific items in say our collateral section, which we had lengthy collateral paragraphs, and they had to just pick certain items to type and index. With intelligent indexing, now we can lasso the whole paragraph and attach it without worry of mistakes or hesitation.”

The most populous county in Oklahoma is now a 21st century model of efficiency, accountability, and transparency.