Perceptive Software, Inc.
Financial Aid Index Scheme Overview
FINANCIAL AID INDEX SCHEME OVERVIEW
Overview
Without the right indexing scheme, a user may not be able to quickly locate and view
the documents they need. In a worse case scenario, they may never be able to find it
at all! This document will help you work through the process of determining the
best index scheme for your situation, give you some things to think about, and
provides hints on what others have used in the past.
WHERE DO YOU START?
You must first ask yourself a few questions. How does my department search for a document now? What
information do they need in order to find the correct document(s)? Try to visualize a filing cabinet. A cabinet
usually has three to four drawers. Within these drawers are folders. Within these folders, documents are
usually placed in a specific order, or even tabbed. And sometimes, documents are placed in order behind the
tab. ImageNow uses the same filing technique, but just places it in the digital form. So what does your
department’s filing cabinet(s) look like?
DOCUMENT SEARCH GRID
The Document Search Grid in the example below provides an example of documents with their index keys
and other useful information. Some of the fields are indexed, while some are non-indexed. You should note
that the indexed fields in the Document Search Grid appear with bold column headers. Also, indexed fields
can be searched on and sorted, whereas non-indexed fields cannot.
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Financial Aid Index Scheme Overview
INDEXING FIELDS
You have six fields from which you can search for information. They are: Drawer, Folder, Tab, Field 3, Field 4,
and Field 5. This is where you need to decide what information you and your staff needs to have in order to
search for the correct documents. For example, how does the staff search for Joe Smith’s application or Jane
Doe’s transcript in your filing cabinets when called or visited in the office? The information needed to perform
that search is what you will use to fill in the following fields:
DRAWER
The Drawer is an important field. The department name is normally used here. If there are multiple
drawers needed, we will name these drawers, such as DEPT-Historical or DEPT-Checks. Therefore, if
more departments are added to ImageNow in the future, such as Admissions, we can name the drawers
ADMISSIONS-Historical. You will not have the confusion with the staff on what information is in what
drawers. And it also allows you, as the administrator, to set rights on who can see which drawers.
Some departments may not want other departments or those users to see their departments’
documents.
FOLDER
This is the field you want to place your most unique identifier or number that relates to a person. Most
often it is a person’s Social Security Number or Student Id Number. By using this ID number, you can
almost be assured that you will never have a duplicate number or record, and therefore reducing the
chance of indexing the document to a wrong individual.
TAB
Name is normally what we suggest for this field. Most people want to put name in the folder field, but
what happens when someone changes their name? How would you be able to find Jane Doe’s
documents when she was single and used the name Jane Smith for the first two years at your college
and then used Doe in the last two years? In this field and the next you can use last name and then first
name in the Field 3 area. This also depends on how your host application is setup and how the name
appears there. You can combine first and last name into this field, if they appear separately.
FIELD 3
If you decide to just have the last name in the tab field, you can place the first name in this field. But if
they are combined (due to your system or how you want to index), this field could be a variety of
things. Maybe you want to include the term, a birth date, or even his/her middle initial. It really
depends on what information is important to you.
Term might be a good field to use. This would allow for you to distinguish paperwork from a person’s
freshman year to his/her senior year. Also, you should consider if this information is on your host
application. You might want to see what other information can be pulled from your host application.
Is there a unique Student ID?
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Financial Aid Index Scheme Overview
FIELD 4
Let’s say our first fields are SSN, Name, and Term. You can easily search for documents with these
three fields, but you are still left to searching page by page for specific documents with only these three
values. In this field or even in Field 3 or Field 5, you can use a predefined list. This allows a person to
search for specific documents by the type. You can see in the document search grid above, this allows
the user to see all the types of documents in a person’s folder. You can see Mary’s SSN card, her
application, and transcripts. Instead of scrolling through 100 documents in one folder, you can separate
documents.
FIELD 5
Again, information used in this field should be something important to your searching needs. You
should not feel like you need to fill in all fields. You can leave fields blank!
EXAMPLE
So you think you have idea what you might like to use, but what are other schools doing? How do they
index? See the attached Index Scheme Example.doc for ideas!
OPTIONS
While we may not have addressed all of your indexing needs in this document there are other things we can do
to customize ImageNow to your needs.
Visual Basic (VB) scripts can be employed to manipulate your collected data before it becomes a saved field. For
instance, you may want to store social security numbers without any dashes between the numbers. Or you may
wish to take a name such as “Bruce Jones” and reorder it as “Jones, Bruce”. These and other manipulations of
data are possible using simple VB Scripts.
You can also filter out fields for searching. ImageNow will ignore these fields when it performs the “look-up”
of a student record from the host application. As an example, if your DRAWER is FINAID, your FOLDER is
Student ID Number, and TAB is AID YEAR. Your search would retrieve a list of all documents associated with
a student id and the aid year. The search would be independent of the student’s name in this case. This is
important consideration, since names are not constant. They often change, therefore making it difficult to
search by the name field.
HINTS
Consistency is a good thing. You do not have to have the same indexing schemes for each drawer, but there are
advantages to keeping the same index scheme for all your drawers.
Let’s say you want to have SSN in the FOLDER field and LAST NAME in the TAB field for one of your drawers
and then you want to use LAST NAME in the FOLDER field and SSN in the TAB field for another one of your
drawers. When you go into the document search grid, ImageNow will place all the information in the FOLDER
field in the same column, therefore, displaying mixed information. Having both NAME and SSN in the
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Financial Aid Index Scheme Overview
FOLDER and TAB columns is difficult to search on. How will your staff know where to look for the
information?
In the examples above, we used Document Type as an index value. We can create predefined lists for all your
document types so when your staff is processing/linking your documents, they do not have to type in each
document name. This does take more time in the beginning to process each document, however it does save
time when searching and retrieving specific documents and eliminates entry errors. This is something you may
want to consider when deciding whether to use this value.
Simplicity is also another good thing. Keep it simple. Do not try to search on all the information you have.
Sometimes too much information will hinder your search efforts. We want to keep this as simple as possible.
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