Solihull-based IT firm DocZone has unveiled a new document capture and indexing system it claims will massively reduce the time and effort needed to file paperwork.

The firm says the system - called vFiler - can capture, index, search and retrieve documents quickly and accurately for a fraction of the cost of other systems.

"It can handle about 400 documents an hour," said Lee Cassidy, managing director of DocZone. "That's a far cry from the slow old days when one person might have, at best, processed two or three documents a minute.

"VFiler can process almost any file type and automatically place it into a database where the document can then be electronically accessed from anywhere in the world."

The time-saving and cost-effective process begins to work when an image is either scanned, downloaded from an email or saved as a document to a folder.

This capture process monitors user-defined folders in which it has been told what to look out for via a bar code or invoice number. Using sophisticated optical character recognition (OCR) to read fields within the document it compares the data against a database for validation.

Mr Cassidy said this facility takes DocZone to the next level in providing offices and companies with the necessary tools to achieve as near to the paperless office as possible.

"VFiler processes documents that are placed into a designated local or network folder and recognises either the full content of a document, a bar code or process the document as a form. VFiler's ability to recognise different document types is a powerful feature that is used across many applications; this is particularly useful in accounts payable departments, where hundreds of vendor invoices are immediately and accurately stored. "It will work in tangent with our electronic filing system which is already changing the way businesses store and retrieve all of their files that might previously have been paper-based.

"In storing documents, vFiler can handle numerous different types of database documents including Windows, Access, SQL, MySQL and Oracle. It is bound to speed up the task of filing new documents which will save a fortune for companies and generally make office life much simpler."