 Mangofile is a comprehensive electronic filing and document management system that uses an easy-to-understand cabinet metaphor to help you to organise your document images. Mangofile contains everything you need to scan your original documents, store, retrieve and print them.
How does Mangofile work and why is it so different to other current system on the market?
Many software solutions in this area allow you to scan and save documents within a folder on your PC, and that's it, the problem with this is the organisation, even the most organised of folder structures are time consuming to maintain. The next real issue for such software is the retrieval, there is no real link to a document other then the single description you saved it as, so what good is this to you? It becomes a slow and tedious search process to recover the right document. Further still, what if you are actually keeping all these items as hard copy in folders, I know it takes time to find anything that way, which leave you to put everything back in its place.
So let Mangofile do it for you, taking away the need to organise both how and where, to simply filling in a search index created by you, for you.
Old method of Storing
Here I will explain the unique ability Mangofile has when storing and retrieving any type of electronic file.
Lets for a moment stay with the usual software applications, which use folder base storage along with the 'indexing' method.
Take a phone bill, scan it, then in the best case scenario you navigate to a folder called Bills, to save the scan record with a single name, which relates to the file, BT for example. That would be the full process, simple enough, however, you have mealy two reference points at best; Document Type for the folder and Document Name for the scanned item.
Old method of Retrieving
Now to retrieve it, where do you start? Where is the folder? You have to remember where to look if you need to retrieve the file back within an efficient manor, or even remember what it's called, and this is the problem. Not only, once found, will it return only the one single document, but what if its the wrong one and how do you organise records for; insurance, car, emails, doctor, house hold bills, bank statements? This list is endless, and you'll need a folder within folders to get any sort of structure, retrieving that single item is a laborious boring process.
Now for Mangofile's saving and retrieving.
The default index in the demo is a very popular choice and so here its is:
| Document Name |
Often the Company Name or document heading |
| Document Type |
Bill, Receipt, statement invoice. Making this one cabinet very flexible, storing a greater range of document. |
| Document Reference |
For any associated Reference or Account Reference |
| Document Date |
Date on the document |
| Document Amount |
Amount or total for a Bill/Invoice or receipt. Useful when browsing search results |
This of course can be altered to fit your needs or, much like you can have multiple drawers in a filing cabinet, you can create entirely different set of index's for entirely different document set, but we'll touch on that one shortly.
Scan in a document, press save and you'll get the document indexing box similar to the one pictured above. Fill out the index with as much information possibly provided by the original document and the again press save. Your document is now stored away with the relevant data you have just provided. Now move on to your next batch of scanned items, if you have any.
The power and simplicity is noticed when you want to search and retrieve. Using this same indexing layout as you did when saving the document(s), providing as little or as much detail as you like when searching, press search, and you are returned with a list of records. Easy. The best bit is you don't even have to fill out this form in the exact way you did when saving the document(s) earlier, by using partial 'wild card' searching.
The search results returned can be in itself a useful viewing tool to quickly view what you have.
You could search on all the Bills you have indexed, and if you have provided a value of the bill in the index you will have a quick run down of costs and see if some are unusually large or track your electricity bills, see if they are on the increase year on year.
Everyone has their own reason and purpose for Mangofile, but they all have shared the same benefit, the simplicity of saving and retrieving a document quickly, along with other such useful tools.
To find out for yourself just how much functionality can be found, we suggest downloading the demo version and reading through the the user guide.
In Depth
Mentioned earlier; multiple indexes. The other option to Mangofile is having 'Cabinets' these act to help separate document types, often used in business sectors.
As said earlier, its like having separate draws in a filing cabinet, one draw could hold all personnel records, and another could hold all orders sent out. These two draws are referred to as Cabinets in Mangofile, and as such each cabinet has a very different indexing requirement; Personnel Records would include Employee Name, Number and Reference, where as Orders would be Order Numbers, Value and Customer Name.
So in a case when you may need to have a completely different indexing reference, you can create separate cabinets. You have to be careful not be duplicating too much and making an inefficient search system. Documents that have a similar index can use a Document Type field, such as the one in the demo, where Receipts, Bills, Statements and Invoices can share the same cabinet.
Remember
The key point to remember is that for any system even hard copies, the speed and efficiency for retrieving any document will be down to the way the document was stored/indexed in the first place. Mangofile makes saving an intuitive process for everyday documents.
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