Paris for UK Local Government and Housing Association communications

Control the production of your Housing communications

Paris is the leading solution for the design, generation and delivery of UK Tenancy and Service Charge letters, Statements, Notifications and Surveys.

Housing Communications

Every housing organisation in the UK sends a variety of documents to their tenants, leaseholders and service receivers. Examples are documents around the application for and set-up of new tenancies, rent and service charge letters and statements (including recovery letters), estate management items and housing repairs correspondence.

The housing process usually runs annually, but there are many circumstances that will generate changes and therefore additional ad-hoc correspondence within this period. This could be because of a new housing application or referral, a change in tenancy (or terms), a change in rent, a change in service charges, a change in housing benefits/allowance, the arrears position (including relevant recovery process stages) and both planned and unplanned repair items.

There is also an ongoing need to communicate with tenants for estate management items.When circumstances change, a predefined document will be triggered and created within the host application. Similarly, at a pre-defined time each period, documents are triggered and created within the host application as part of the recovery process. The unchanged host application templates are responsible for the broad content of documents and these are exported automatically to PARIS.

PARIS is then used to automatically create the actual document that is sent by following the easy to set-up and change user defined rules held in the PARIS template. These rules control exactly how the document looks, what content is included and whether an opportunity to consolidate into a single envelope or to deliver electronically exists, and if so enables it. PARIS automatically adds value to the data being supplied by the host application and in the process can enable considerable savings opportunities for housing organisations each year.

As an example, a typical housing organisation could realise a reduction of over 22% of their outgoing mailings by utilising the PARIS Mail consolidation service across their outgoing documents – that could be many thousands of pounds.  The delivery of multiple documents in a single envelope also improves the perception of how the organisation is being run.

PARIS also allows the organisation to offer its correspondence electronically, rather than by post. The correspondence may be sent as a PDF attachment or be accessed via a web-based self-service portal using any web-enabled device (tablet, smartphone, or PC).

All correspondence can be designed for maximum clarity to help drive required outcomes and can adhere to any standards the housing organisation has or would like to adopt.  A re-branding exercise and improvements to standard application output are easily completed.  A simple example is in the case of an arrears letter for a non-Direct-Debit payer, as a Paypoint or Allpay barcode can be added to enable cash payment at appropriate outlets. Another example is that any document to be returned to the organisation, such as an application for housing or tenancy correspondence, can have relevant information included in a barcode so that it can be more efficiently processed upon its return. The business process is optimized.

All correspondence can also be automatically fed to the organisation’s document management solution so that a full audit trail of correspondence can be captured and referred to, with copies of the actual documents sent, rather than just the data.

Any paper documents can be printed internally or externally.  If printed internally they can be printed on any printer that is connected to the organisation’s network, so remote offices have the same capability as an internal print facility. Plain paper is used throughout and can be printed on both sides, removing the need for costly pre-printed forms and expensive stationery. Alternatively, PARIS generated documents can be sent to an external organisation for printing and/or mailing functions.

XLPrint’s PARIS software system can significantly improve the entire document creation, optimization and delivery of all housing based correspondence.