Meet Semper Augustus Investments
Semper Augustus Investments is an SEC-registered investment advisor founded in 1998. The firm manages concentrated equity portfolios for high-net-worth clients, focusing on fundamental value investing. With principal offices in Denver and St. Louis, Semper Augustus oversees assets for 200+ clients.
As a registered investment advisor, the firm is required to comply with strict SEC regulations. This includes maintaining detailed audit trails, ensuring fair representation of investment results, and providing transparent reporting to clients and regulators.
Daily Detour: Time-Consuming Reporting
Before implementing Laserfiche, Semper Augustus faced a challenge that’s familiar in finance: compliance requirements consumed excessive staff time and created potential risks.
The firm's portfolio management relied on CompositeBuilder integrated with PortfolioCenter to manage investment portfolios. While these systems generated the necessary reports, the compliance documentation process was entirely manual. Staff had to follow a complex 25-step procedure to ensure fair representation of investment calculations and maintain proper audit trails.
Each month brought additional burden. A third-party accountant sent ten financial reports for the firm's pooled investment vehicle. One report alone contained 70 individual investor statements. Staff had to print, sort, collate, and distribute these reports by hand—a time-intensive process prone to errors.
The manual approach created several problems:
- Staff spent hours on repetitive documentation tasks
- Inconsistent execution of compliance procedures
- Risk of missing critical steps in the audit trail
- Difficulty maintaining transparency across team members
- Manual distribution of client statements consumed significant resources
The Solution: Smart Automation Meets Practical Results
Semper Augustus partnered with MCCi to implement Laserfiche, creating an automated content services platform that addresses both compliance and operational efficiency needs.
Automated Compliance Documentation
The firm developed a digital version of their 25-step compliance process using Laserfiche Forms. Each step became a structured digital form containing:
- Clear purpose statements for each procedure
- Step-by-step instructions for staff
- Screenshots showing required system configurations
- Comment boxes for additional notes
As staff complete each step, supporting reports from the portfolio accounting system are reviewed and uploaded directly to the form. The system automatically prompts users to move to the next step, ensuring no procedures are skipped.
Team members receive automated email notifications throughout the process. Everyone stays informed about work status without manual communication.
Centralized Document Management
Each completed form is saved automatically in Laserfiche. It applies the appropriate template, meaning it standardizes document metadata fields and folder structures, ensuring consistent file naming, categorization, and storage patterns for easier retrieval and compliance. This creates comprehensive documentation at every step.
When the final form is submitted, Laserfiche Workflow compiles all forms and uploads reports into a complete voucher package. These packages can contain up to 4,000 pages—all organized and accessible digitally.
Intelligent Report Distribution
The monthly financial statement process became completely automated. Reports arrive via email and save automatically to a network folder. Laserfiche Import Agent brings them into the system.
Next, the system:
- Extracts account numbers using Pattern Matching
- Splits the large document into 70 individual statements
- Queries the Junxure CRM system to populate metadata
- Routes each statement to the appropriate client folder
The Results
The automation delivered measurable improvements in both compliance and operational efficiency.
Time Savings and Efficiency Gains
The automated compliance process eliminated manual documentation tasks that previously consumed significant staff hours. The 25-step procedure now runs consistently every time, reducing compliance risk while freeing staff to focus on higher-value activities.
Monthly financial statement distribution transformed from a manual, multi-hour process to a completely automated operation. The system processes 70 individual client statements without human intervention.
Enhanced Compliance and Audit Readiness
Every step in the compliance process creates automatic documentation with timestamps and user tracking. Auditors can access complete voucher packages instantly, with all supporting documents organized and searchable.
The firm maintains comprehensive audit trails for all regulatory requirements, ensuring the consistent execution of compliance procedures across all staff members.
Improved Client Service
Automated statement distribution ensures clients receive their financial reports promptly and accurately. The system eliminates manual sorting errors while providing faster delivery of critical information.
See it in Action
All-in-One Solution
Semper Augustus uses CompositeBuilder, which is integrated with the PortfolioCenter portfolio accounting system, to manage investment portfolios. The firm developed a 25-step process with Laserfiche Forms that was modeled after the CompositeBuilder user manual to ensure fair representation of calculations and provide full disclosure of investment results. The Laserfiche Forms-powered process serves as a detailed checklist and instruction manual for Semper Augustus employees.
One form corresponds to each step and contains the following information:
- The purpose of the step.
- Instructions on how to perform the work.
- Screenshots of any settings the user may need to configure in CompositeBuilder to run the report.
- Comment box.
Everything in one place, nothing gets lost.
In each step, there is at least one supporting report generated from the portfolio accounting system that is reviewed by the user and uploaded to the form.
Stop chasing people for missing information.
Once the form is submitted, the user is prompted to move to the next step in the process by filling out the next form.
Throughout the process, other members within the firm receive the status update through automated email notifications, so that everyone is in the loop on work status. Here is what the whole Laserfiche Forms business process looks like:
Get rid of the busy work.
As the steps are completed, each form is saved in its own folder in Laserfiche with the appropriate template applied. This process ensures that documentation is retained at each step in the process.
The last several forms in the process are used to capture all documents provided to the verifier (an auditor), such as a new client’s custodial statement or investment application. Those documents are also uploaded using Laserfiche Forms in order to maintain a record of audited items.
Once the last form is submitted, Laserfiche Workflow strips the screenshots and compiles all of the forms and uploaded reports into one complete voucher package. A single voucher package can have as many as 4,000 pages.
