Monday, November 27, 2006
By MELINDA J. OVERSTREET

“Efficiency in government offices” may seem like a self-contradicting phrase to some skeptics, but a small Elizabethtown company is finding ways to make the concept a reality across the commonwealth and the country.

Advent Financial Systems provides Internet-based software solutions to county prosecutors’ offices. Company President Josh Hartlage said the primary focus now is on two programs — CheckRighter and WarrantManager — but other products are under development.

The idea behind the CheckRighter program originated in Hardin County 25 years ago, when then-County Attorney Steve Bland commissioned the creation of a program to track collection of bad checks. The program went through several changes and was optimized through the efforts of Ken Howard, the current county attorney, Hartlage said.

A while back, H. Wayne Smith, one of Advent’s two other partners, had conversations with Howard, and ideas took off from there. Advent recognized the value of the program and thought other counties could benefit from it. The company, which also includes Jim Hartlage, Josh Hartlage’s father, purchased the rights to the application from the original developer, rewrote the program to be Web-enabled and launched it in March, Josh Hartlage said.

Having the programs Web-based rather than installing them on the prosecutors’ systems makes sense from a support standpoint, Josh Hartlage said. He doesn’t have to worry about compatibility with information technology each office has or doesn’t have.

“By having it online at our office, when we make a change, it goes into effect for everybody all at once,” he said. “We only have to rely on our own computers.”

That keeps costs lower for him, because it cuts down on travel time to various sites, and makes it affordable for the counties, he said.

“We give them some automation they’ve been looking for for a long time and at an affordable cost to them,” Josh Hartlage said.

The company continues to tweak the programs using feedback from new and existing customers.

“Each county says, ‘That’s great, but if it could just do this,’” Josh Hartlage said.

CheckRighter manages the process of recovering bad checks for area merchants. This typically is a labor-intensive, paper-driven process in most county attorneys’ offices, he said. CheckRighter “electronifies” the process and completes much of the work for the office, allowing employees in the county attorneys’ offices to focus on other items of interest, he said.

“The unique thing to our program is the banking component,” he said.

The person who wrote the check with insufficient funds is given a deposit slip to put the money to cover the check into an account created by Advent from which another check then is written to the merchant by Advent on behalf of the county attorney. It keeps the county attorneys’ offices from having to deal directly with the merchants’ money and eliminates the awkwardness of merchants’ dealing with the person who wrote the check, Hartlage said.

“Within weeks, we saw the need for the warrant piece and tried to fit that into the puzzle,” he said.

WarrantManager stores and tracks defendant and plaintiff information and creates necessary documents such as warrants, summonses and subpoenas.

Hartlage’s experience in sales and marketing paired with his computer science degree are paying off as both ideas are taking off.

Advent has clients in 15 Kentucky counties and three more in Mississippi counties.

“We should have 20 by the end of this year. Forty by the end of next year is the plan,” Hartlage said.

While spreading its wings to other states, the company still is looking for more clients in its home state, targeting larger counties first.

“We’re about to meet that critical-mass point in Kentucky,” he said.

That’s the point at which potential clients start calling him — instead of the other way around — because they’ve heard about the products through word-of-mouth advertising.

The company has done a great deal of research into other states’ bad check laws to decide which ones to approach first.

“We put together some criteria and they match pretty well,” Hartlage said of Mississippi. “So we didn’t have to make a lot of changes to our system.”

The next four states are Alabama, Georgia, Ohio and Oklahoma.

“We went through all 50 states and how well their laws matched up, and then we looked at it from a proximity standpoint. We didn’t want our first customer to be California, for example,” he said.