The automatic decision templates recently introduced in the e-Business Register significantly reduce the effort of entrepreneurs in formalizing management decisions and thereby support the guidelines of the Government's Economic Growth Council to simplify dealings with the state.
The new functionality allows entrepreneurs to fill in only the specified data fields when electing a new board member, recalling them, extending their term of office or amending the articles of association, after which the environment automatically creates a legally correct decision draft and the proposed distribution of votes in the background.
Previously, this process required the manual preparation and digital signing of documents, which, despite the existence of samples, led to numerous formatting errors and the return of documents, and extended the processing time.
In addition to practical time savings, the new solution ensures machine-readability of data, creating a comprehensive data set on which in-depth artificial intelligence analytics can be built in the future.
According to Tambet Artma, the Business Register Team Leader at the Centre of Registers and Information Systems (RIK), the Estonian Business Register is already unique in the world in terms of its structure and its strong digital foundations help create real innovation.
“Although most of the register data is machine-readable, the additional documents required for procedures have so far been one of the main reasons for the elimination of deficiencies, because we do not have the opportunity to pre-validate them. With the new machine-readable templates, we are automating the preparation of documents and taking a big step towards reducing bureaucracy. This is the next development of critical importance, which will lead to significant time savings, open the door to much more accurate analytics and take our already state-of-the-art register to a completely new level,” said Artma.
First real results
Although the functionality has only been in public use for a little over a month and is currently operating as a beta version, the first real results show a clear increase in efficiency.
According to a recent analysis by RIK, 22.61 percent of the applications covered by templates were submitted in the new way in May this year, or a total of 599 applications.
Of the entrepreneurs who used the document template, 78.22 percent passed the registry check on the first attempt, while this figure was nearly seven percentage points lower for documents submitted in the usual way.
Also, a full 77.46 percent of applications submitted using the template ended with a positive entry, exceeding the success rate of submissions without a template, which remained at 70.84 percent.
The innovation has also significantly reduced the need to correct and re-formulate documents, as the proportion of repeated attempts fell to 12.31 percent when using the template, compared to 17.59 percent in the usual procedures.
The most noticeable decrease has been in the number of negative or corrective resolutions and waivers, which amounted to only 1.33 percent for templates, significantly different from the historical level of seven percent and 3.45 percent for standard procedures.
The procedure time was shortened from the previous 1.4 days to less than one day, or a median of 0.99 days, ensuring faster processing for entrepreneurs without the need to communicate further with the registration department to correct errors.
Time savings calculations show that the work of creating a document is accelerated for the entrepreneur from 25 minutes to ten minutes on average. If we add to this the time saved by the registration department, which would have been spent checking each incorrect document and preparing the order, the new solution saves an estimated 951 man-hours per year based on current volumes.
As the system is constantly being developed and bilingual support and linking to the articles of association are being improved, it is planned to make templates the main option in the e-business register in the future in order to bring the proportion of successful procedures on the first attempt as close as possible to the target of 100%.
Automating the business register and simplifying the submission of documents is one of the proposals of the Efficiency and Growth Council convened by the government to stimulate the economy and reduce bureaucracy.