How to Process Enrollment Documents Efficiently and Digitally

Without a doubt, student enrollment is a document-heavy and time-consuming process. On top of new student registrations, schools must keep up with the constant flow of students transferring in-and-out throughout the school year. Besides the sheer number of individual enrollments that need to be processed, school administration is also responsible for the numerous documents involved with each student application. Such as:

• Birth Certificate
• Proof of Guardianship/Custody
• Proof of Residency
• Immunization Records
• Common Application Form
• Emergency Contact Form
• Former School Records
• IEP Records
• Teacher Recommendations

School administration must review these documents along with applications in order to ensure each student qualifies for enrollment. However, documents submitted in different formats, such as paper copies, digital scans, or photos can cause further frustration for staff. Most of the time, schools save them all as paper copies, but physical storage is costly and difficult to maintain. Here’s how school administration can tackle the challenges of enrollment document processing—by enabling digital document conversion, editing, and organization with a PDF Editor.

Different Document Formats – Convert to Digital

As previously mentioned, students must submit numerous documents to qualify for enrollment. A lot of the times, these documents are in different file types, such as a photo of a birth certificate or a paper bill for proof of residency. With a PDF Editor, the school administrators can convert all these different documents from paper, scanned TIFF, PNG/JPEG, or Word docs into PDF in a single process. Having these documents in PDF, the standard document file of choice, will enable schools to access and save all their student documents easily, without worrying about changing the original content of the documents. This will help automate the way schools process enrollment documents, saving time and boosting organization.

Incomplete Forms – Ensure Form-filling Completion

Besides sharing proof of student information and residency, there are also the basic application forms required for students. Most of the time these forms are paper or digital documents that are not text fillable. An incomplete or incorrectly filled form can prolong the enrollment process, resulting in frustrated parents and staff. Take preventive measures by creating a PDF form will fillable form fields. With PDF forms, school administrators can set restrictions such as numbers only for social security numbers, required sections that need to be filled before saving, digital signature, etc.

Not Enough Space – Document Archiving and Protection

When schools are done processing enrollment documents and forms for student applications, they must save and archive them. Schools are responsible for every student on campus and must keep their information on hand in case of emergencies and for legal reasons. Paper documents require physical storage, which is incredibly costly and impractical. Even on the digital side, cloud storage can build up quite quickly. That’s why PDF is the perfect file format for document archiving. With a PDF Editor schools can compress document files and reduce their size, saving space and costs. School administration can also protect their student documents with password protection, metadata editing, and redaction to ensure confidential information does not fall into the wrong hands.

Foxit Software – The Leading Adobe Acrobat Alternative Worldwide

It’s clear that student enrollment is not a simple one-step task. With Foxit PDF solutions such as PhantomPDF, schools can have the right technology to make their job more efficient. Join the 575 million users who made the switch to Foxit Software today. Learn more about Foxit PDF Education Solutions here: https://www.foxit.com/edu/