The Hays County Clerk team was seeking a solution to streamline data entry tasks for indexing and verification. The county had faced significant staff turnover during the COVID-19 pandemic, coinciding with an increasing volume of documents. At times, the team was up to three weeks behind for final verification, requiring additional employees and overtime to stay on top of workloads.

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The previous indexing and verification process, had many similarities to other counties across the country, and worked as follows:

• Indexing: Once documents were recorded in the system of record (Tyler Eagle), they were placed in an indexing queue to be manually processed by staff. Clerks would key in grantor, grantee, legal descriptions, and other details from each document.
• Verification: After indexing, documents moved to the verification queue, where another clerk would manually re-enter the same data.
• Quality Control: Finally, a quality control team would review the document before it was made publicly available.

This process was not only tedious but also led to high stress, staff turnover, and reduced quality time for assisting taxpayers in the office.

The Hays County Clerk team was already familiar with Just Appraised and its use of AI to assist the Tax Assessor’s office. With Just Appraised now operating in over 225 counties, the team knew the core AI technology had been battle-tested.. Facing ongoing budget requests for additional staff, they began exploring a technology solution to avoid further manpower costs. After seeing a demo of the Auto-Indexing product for the Clerk's office, they were eager to implement it.

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The Just Appraised Auto-Indexing solution works as follows:

• Integration: Just Appraised seamlessly integrates with the county's existing system of record, pulling in document images directly into the Just Appraised platform.
• Auto-Population: Using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and machine learning (ML), Just Appraised auto-populates key data fields with 95%+ accuracy.
• Custom Configurations: The platform can be configured to extract data from various document types and adhere to the county's indexing business rules.
• Ease of Use: Instead of manually entering data, clerks can review pre-populated fields, and with a single click, the data is sent directly into Tyler Eagle.

The team was very impressed with the accuracy of AI, but they also called out the software's ability to incorporate their extensive set of business rules, as well as the machine learning functionality that allows the system to continuously improve over time.

The impact of the Just Appraised solution was immediate and significant. In a post-implementation study, the team compared the time taken to process 100 records using the old workflow versus the Just Appraised system. The results were clear: the team was 50% more efficient with Just Appraised. 

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Other key outcomes included:

• Cost Savings: The office no longer needed to request overtime or additional manpower to stay on schedule.
• Improved Accuracy: The county saw a 6% improvement in accuracy as part of the empirical study.
• Improved Morale: Staff morale significantly improved, as employees no longer felt overwhelmed by deadlines. The team had more time to meet with taxpayers and focus on strategic projects, such as ensuring compliance with state requirements.

In the team’s words: "We are so glad we took the leap with Just Appraised."