pdfFiller for Vallon Consulting: Assisting Compliance Consultants with Document Preparation

Compliance consultancy is one of the most document-intense business sectors in today’s economy. When you are consulting for hundreds of clients at the same time, document preparation inches closer to Mission Impossible with every passing day.

Moreover, you are expected to combine skills that tend to contradict each other — quick document delivery and errorless data management. Suppose you’re consulting for the trucking industry. In that case, the responsibility on your shoulders increases exponentially as your clients are always on the go and don’t often have all the facilities for document management at their disposal.

We discussed these daily challenges for compliance consultants in an interview with Rowena Thornton, CEO, Vallon Consulting LLC.

Customer profile

Vallon Consulting specializes in compliance services for the trucking industry. A team of 12 people started using pdfFiller in early 2020, following the recommendation of a business partner.

Interviewee’s name

Rowena Thornton CEO/Managing Director, Vallon Consulting LLC

Traditional pen-and-paper document workflows before the introduction of pdfFiller

Just like most compliance consultants, Rowena used to rely on old school pen-and-paper workflows. Naturally, they were subject to the typical setbacks of a traditional workflow — consuming huge amounts of paper, delays due to human error, lost documents, missed signatures, documents jammed in a fax machine, the list goes on.

Two specific points of interest for Vallon Consulting’s business practices also turned out to be the two factors that led Rowena to digital workflows:

1 — Vallon Consulting’s entire team is virtual. There is no physical office. Thus, pen-and-paper workflows were never the best option.

2 — Working with trucking companies means Rowena’s customers are on the road 99% of the time, with no access to a printer or scanner, and no exact physical address for arranging document delivery.

Rowena’s interest in pdfFiller was triggered by a less-popular feature — document merging. One of Rowena’s business partners mentioned that pdfFiller offers this functionality. This turned out to be the start of a digital revolution for Vallon’s virtual office:

“I needed a platform that could merge documents together, edit them, sign them, then email or fax them. Ideally, all in one. I was introduced to pdfFiller last year. So I just went and got an account for myself, and have been using pdfFiller ever since. It makes my life easier, especially considering that we are filling out pretty much the same documents continuously.”

— Rowena Thornton,
CEO/Managing Director, Vallon Consulting LLC

Benefits achieved with pdfFiller

After two full years of using pdfFiller as their main document preparation tool as well as a document storage space, Rowena came back to us with the following feedback:

1. Significant effects on overall team productivity:

“Quicker turnaround time for signed documents means more productivity, it means we have more time for other, more important tasks.”

2. The time-saving effect has been impressive considering the fact that Vallon’s list of clients has been steadily increasing:

“Downloading a document, filling it by hand, and then scanning it again was always a hassle, but it can be acceptable when you are small… But when you are looking at hundreds of clients at a time, or even thousands, as it soon will be with us, you simply do not have time for stacks of paperwork.”

3. Complete elimination of technical hiccups, zero document loss

Excluding printers and scanners from a workflow means no more blurry scans, lost pages, and missing signatures on documents. Since all documents are now emailed or e-faxed from the same source (pdfFiller), they are easier to store, track, and repurpose, all within the same platform.

“It used to take a few days, sometimes even weeks, because a client might not have the paperwork at hand, forgot it, or a page got jammed. And now, with pdfFiller, the whole process of signing documents is just instant.”

Interestingly, on top of all the business benefits, the use of pdfFiller turned out to have an additional psychological benefit as well — better signing practices for every party involved:

“With everything now digitized, we instantly see who received documents from us, opened, and viewed them. This is definitely a helpful tool for all of us”.

— Rowena Thornton,
CEO/Managing Director, Vallon Consulting LLC

Having an organizational account in pdfFiller means complete transparency for every person involved. And transparency, in its turn, is an invaluable contributor to both business trust and operational efficiency.