PaperTrail Now Unites Shared Inboxes, eForms and Documents

As South African businesses head into the last quarter of 2026, Johannesburg developer Egis Software is pointing to three features of its PaperTrail Document Management Software that come into their own when workloads peak: group email handling, electronic forms and rule-driven document routing. Year-end closes, festive season shutdowns and the audits that land in the new year all put pressure on the same thing. That pressure falls on how quickly requests, invoices and approvals move from one desk to the next, and at no other time of year is that pressure higher.

Hunting for a single file is rarely where the hours go. The real losses happen in the handovers. A client's email sits in a shared mailbox that nobody owns. A paper form waits on the desk of a manager who is away. An approval only moves after someone picks up the phone to chase it. PaperTrail aims to remove those handover delays by keeping correspondence, data capture and workflow inside the same secure repository that already holds an organisation's documents.

Team email with clear ownership

PaperTrail's Group Email feature is built for teams that work through high volumes of customer email together. Messages are pulled in automatically from POP and IMAP compliant mail servers, Microsoft Exchange and Lotus among them, and then shared out to team members to action. That ends a familiar problem with group mailboxes, where several people open the same message and nobody knows whether anyone has replied.

Because replies go out from inside PaperTrail, every piece of correspondence on a matter is tracked in one place and threaded automatically under a single item. Teams can set up email aliases as workflow triggers, so a message sent to a specific address starts a defined process straight away instead of waiting to be noticed. A Microsoft add-in lets individual staff push emails from Outlook into PaperTrail, tag them with metadata and assign them to particular users or groups. They can send the full email or just the attachments.

In practice, whether it is a finance department fielding supplier statements, a property team dealing with tenant queries or a service desk handling client requests, every message gets an owner, a history and a place on the record.

Forms that capture data and sign-offs together

PaperTrail also includes electronic forms for collecting data and approvals without any paper. The eForms capability is designed to shorten processing times, speed up approval cycles and cut down on paperwork. Calculations and validations can run automatically, which helps with work such as claims processing and frees staff for the tasks that need a person's judgement.

Paper files can go missing, and electronic forms give organisations a more secure option. PaperTrail supports electronic and biometric signatures, automated look-ups, custom form design and PDF output for printing or routing by email. The eSignature module has also been extended to cover basic ad-hoc and template-based form building, with database look-ups and a wide range of form field options.

Getting each item to the right person

Once a document or form has been captured, it has to reach the right person. Authorised users can forward or route documents to individuals or groups. Administrators can build sequential routes or rule-based workflows that manage escalation and send each item to the right user for processing. Data can be exported to external systems too. Rules and workflows are set up in a straightforward administration console or a graphical workflow designer, so processes can change as the business does.

Taken together, these capabilities make a document management system work more like an operating layer for paperwork. One email can arrive, trigger a workflow, pull in a form, go out for approval, collect a signature and end up in the repository with its whole history attached.

The foundation: capture, storage and search

All of this runs on the core of PaperTrail Document Management, a secure electronic repository for both digital and scanned documents that can be reached from anywhere at any time. Files are arranged in a flexible folder taxonomy and shared with employees and clients through collaboration tools, and searching and reporting on specific documents is built in.

On the capture side, PaperTrail automates bulk and online capture, image enhancement and full-page or zonal optical character recognition. It also handles form and barcode recognition with automatic or manual page separation, which means paper that still turns up at reception can enter the same digital process as everything else.

Industries and clients

Organisations in many different industries use PaperTrail. Clients whose feedback appears on the PaperTrail website include IHS Property Management, Triton Fleet, CBI-Electric, iStore, TWF, Old Mutual, Fair Cape Dairies and the South African Reserve Bank. Their comments mention remote working on electronic application and lease systems, simpler responses to auditors, procurement and creditors processes, and weekend support during system changes.

The same components sit behind a group of targeted solutions. CreditorsHub automates accounts payable, covering everything from supplier invoice processing through to remittance and reconciliation. PeopleHub runs the employee lifecycle from recruitment to onboarding and keeps it in line with regulatory requirements. LeaseHub collects documents, runs credit checks and makes lease signing easier for tenants and agents. TravelHub automates the collection of supplier invoices for the travel industry. All four rely on the group email, eForm and workflow features covered above.

Deployment options and ongoing support

Clients can run PaperTrail on premise or have it hosted in the cloud. Choosing the hosted route lowers IT investment and moves costs from capital expenditure to operating expenditure. Instead of selling rigid, shrink-wrapped products that make a business change its processes, Egis Software configures PaperTrail around each client.

The company's services cover business process re-engineering, business analysis and specification, solution implementation and development, user and administrator training, fully managed cloud and on-premise servers, outsourced scanning and indexing, and first, second and third level support under service level agreements. Its help desk offers 24/7 support for critical systems, with flexible options to suit each client. Egis Software has been developing and supporting the platform since 1998, which gives it more than twenty years of experience with how South African organisations handle documents.

The case for acting before December

Unanswered emails, unsigned forms and stalled approvals do the most harm in the run-up to December. They carry over into January as a backlog at the same moment auditors arrive and new budgets begin. Organisations planning how to deal with that load can book a demonstration with the PaperTrail team to see how group email, eForms and workflow work together.

For more information on PaperTrail and its full set of solutions, visit https://www.papertrail.co.za/.

About PaperTrail

PaperTrail is an electronic content management system developed by Egis Software, the trading name of Mailcomp (Pty) Ltd. Alon Feldman and Troy Ferraris founded Egis Software in 1998, and the company is headquartered at 138 Athol Street, Highlands North, Johannesburg. It has branches in Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth and New Zealand, plus strategic partners in Mauritius, Botswana, Ghana and the United Kingdom. Its products include document management, PaperTrail Sign, PaperTrail Contract Management, CreditorsHub, PeopleHub, LeaseHub and TravelHub, all available on premise or hosted in the cloud.