Businesses can now file 24/7 with a new system in place with the Iowa secretary of state’s office.

New software launched June 18 aims to reduce the new business filings wait significantly — from two weeks to less than a day. 

Fast Track Filing has started to accept many of the 20,000 new business filings submitted each year to the office. The system will eventually expand to accept other filings, including business renewals, after a few months of use. The new system is available 24 hours a day at filings.sos.iowa.gov. 

New businesses in Iowa are required to file a certificate of organization, articles of incorporation and a certificate of authority, which will all be available to submit in Fast Track Filing. 

An estimated 30 percent of the 20,000 new filings are rejected each year because of errors in application, Secretary of State Paul Pate said, errors that the online application is programmed to catch immediately. Correcting errors in paper-filed applications can take four to six weeks to remedy and send back through the mail. 

“The volume that we see here is overwhelming,” Pate said. “We’re looking at about 60,000 phone calls a year from small businesses calling in, asking questions or wanting help. … And we have about 12,000 walk-ins who come in to get the paperwork processed or get assistance in some fashion. 

“We figured this was going to save us about 70 hours” of staff labor each week, he said. “That’s the staff time we hope to redirect to customer service.” 

New business filings account for most of the documents submitted to Pate’s staff every year, out of 101 filing categories. Next Pate’s office will prioritize introducing the next 100 categories to Fast Track Filing based on the volume the office receives from each category. Eventually, Pate said, all those filings will be accessible to the public in an online database. 

“We’ve not set a timetable on how fast all of those will be in, but I’m pretty optimistic we can do something at a pretty reasonable rate once we start getting past the first couple,” Pate said. “Every one of these has its own processes — uniform commercial filings is its own beast, and we’re updating that already.” 

Fast Track Filing has been in development since October, led by information technology specialist Kyle Phillips and using funds raised by the Technology Modernization Fund. 

“The idea for this has been around for a while. We just didn’t have the resources to do it,” Phillips said. “I think the thing that did surprise us is just the sheer volume and numbers, because nobody ever looked at how much time this is going to save us. … We didn’t look at that in great detail until more recently.”

The Technology Modernization Fund, approved by the Iowa Legislature in 2017, is provided through an increase in filing rates for the secretary of state’s office from $30 to $45. That fund is temporarily authorized to raise up to $2 million a year through July 2022. 

Until that fund was authorized, the office had been working on a “duct tape and baling wire budget,” Pate said. Most of the existing machinery, including microfiche scanning, has been at the end of its usable life, and staff members were struggling to find replacement parts. 

“In all fairness, our technology was a little embarrassing, looking more like something before Bill Gates even came on the scene, so that dates it a little bit,” Pate said. “Now the staff has some tools, now we just need to give the staff some time to build the things that customers here deserve.” 

Staff members are continuing to digitize 3 million to 5 million business documents, in addition to the 7 million electronic documents already stored by the secretary of state’s office. At the end of the project, Pate said businesses in and out of state should be able to pull up filing documents on the secretary of state’s website without paying for a subscription service. 

“The biggest challenge … is we want to get it cataloged in a format that users can access it and pull up what they need,” Pate said. “If you need to access something, you should be able to use our library.” 

With a limited amount of time on the Technology Modernization Fund, the priority in the office is getting as much of the documents digitized as possible, Pate said. 

“We’re trying to compile what all we need to do. That sounds kind of basic, but when we were in a mode before this that I’d call ‘get through the day’ mode — make sure the equipment operates, make sure we’re able to give the basic services — the amazing thing is the public was pretty satisfied with what we were doing,” he said. 

“We had a lot of dedicated staff who just held it together, but the staff was getting a little frayed and a little worn out, and we couldn’t keep the pace,” he added. “These new technology upgrades are significant, and allow us to not have to count on staff working 60-hour weeks.”

Once all filings are open on Fast Track Filing and the majority of machine processes are updated in the secretary’s office, Pate said the staff will have more time and training to focus on customer service experience. 

“It will allow them to be able to focus on something that’s probably a higher priority for our staff and for the customer,” he said. “We are encouraging people to use online systems and to pay online just as banks do, because the time our staff spends on this isn’t a good use of resources.”