The challenge: manual bottlenecks at scale
As one of the top five transfer institutions in the country, the University of Central Florida (UCF) faced a significant operational hurdle: managing an immense volume of incoming transcripts. Prior to 2025, the university relied on a tedious, manual, multi-step workflow to process approximately 20,967 documents annually.
Staff were required to manually download and separate high school and college transcripts from Parchment Receive Lite. Each batch took 15–45 minutes to process and required staff to visually review transcripts. The university also relied on a dated optical character recognition (OCR) system that required extensive back-end server maintenance and offered an unreliable integration with PeopleSoft. Together, these challenges created inefficiencies, increased administrative effort, and slowed admissions and transfer decisions.
The solution: integrated data automation and receive premium
To modernize their admissions function, UCF implemented Parchment Receive Premium and Data Automation in early 2025.
- Receive Premium: Automatically delivers and loads transcripts directly into UCF’s Slate CRM, ensuring records are associated with the correct student upon receipt without manual document-type separation.
- Data Automation: Purpose-built to read college transcripts and extract key academic data, such as correctly identifying sending institutions and distinguishing between final and in-progress transcripts, delivering it directly into PeopleSoft.
The results: faster decisions and greater scalability
The transition from manual entry to automated extraction delivered immediate, measurable wins for both staff and students:
- Accelerated processing: UCF finalized transfer credit for 51% of over 4,000 new incoming transfer students for Spring 2026 before the term even started.
- Improved student experience: The university placed 41.7% fewer holds on new students in the first full semester using the new system due to faster processing of transcripts.
- Operational efficiency: The solution eliminated manual transcript downloads and sorting, freeing staff capacity for higher-value work.
- Data integrity: Automated association with Slate records improved data accuracy and consistency while reducing risks associated with human error.
Both of these wins have allowed a greater ease of registration and smoother financial aid release for new students. These are big wins for us and we appreciate the services you provide.
Debra Reynolds
Director for Operations and Technology Office of Undergraduate Admissions University of Central Florida
Conclusion
By replacing fragmented, manual uploads and unreliable data integration with scalable automated workflows, UCF has successfully shortened both the time between application and decision and the time between decision and transfer credit processing. This modernized approach ensures that as volume grows, the institution can continue to provide fast, accurate responses to prospective students.
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