With one swipe of a plastic card, two wishes may come true.

The mountains of paperwork human services clients need to fill out will be reduced to molehills. And with the same swipe, case workers will get to chart the progress of their clients.

The Beaufort Cares Card will act as the fairy godmother in the scenario and if all goes according to plan, both wishes will come true sometime in the next three to five months.

The project, named The Mother Edgelee Robinson Black Beaufort Cares Network, will have the capacity to identify the services that children and their families receive from local agencies, said Jim Glasson, United Way of Beaufort County's vice president for community development.

Glasson said the card will work much like a grocery store discount card in that it will act as a single electronic application for any agency that takes part in the project.

The information on the card, which will be provided voluntarily, will be basic demographic information such as a person's name, phone number and Social Security number, Glasson said.

And because the information on the application will be transmitted and stored electronically via the Internet, partner agencies will be able to share information and refer clients to other agencies as well as document the progress of their clients so services are not duplicated, Glasson said.

"The (card) is a researcher's dream," he said.

The money for the project comes from a $785,298 grant awarded last fall by the federal government to the Beaufort County Early Childhood Coalition. About $270,000 of that grant has been set aside for the database program, Glasson said.

The Beaufort County Early Childhood Coalition is made up of the United Way of Beaufort County's Success By 6, the Beaufort County government, the Beaufort County School District, Lowcountry Health District, Healthy Families America Beaufort, Beaufort County's First Steps, the Beaufort County Department of Social Services, and Beaufort-Jasper EOC Head Start.

The application program is being used by counties in Arkansas and North Carolina, but Beaufort County will be the first county in South Carolina to use the program, said Brian Pearson, director of development for Community Development Specialists Inc., the company that markets the program.

Since the Beaufort Cares Network is purchasing a license to use the program, it can offer the application as a service provider, thereby offsetting the cost of program with subscription fees, Pearson said.

"Realistically, the server is powerful enough to host half the counties in the state," Pearson said.

That's because the server, which will be housed in the county government center, will only run the data-storing application and not any others, he said.

Other counties in the Southeast are using the program, but Caldwell County in North Carolina may be the closest.

There, the Human Resources Department was charged seven years ago by county commissioners to find a way to reduce paperwork and help case workers keep track of the benefits their clients received.

After years of research and miles of travel around the country, researchers found what they were looking for in Arkansas, said David Hill, the Caldwell County Human Resources director. He is manager of the project, called the "Integrated Collaborative Assistance Network," known by its acronym, ICAN.

The ICAN project went live a year ago, Hill said. One of the larger challenges the project faced was explaining to clients how the project would work, he said.

"As soon as you tell them the information comes over the Internet, they say, 'No way,' " Hill said. "But we let them know the whole world can't see their information, and that there are security levels and the information is encrypted."

Hill said no system is fail-safe, but once clients were assured the program was voluntary and that they could limit the amount of information agencies could share, they were more willing to participate.

Another problem was the long, drawn out process of coming up with a uniform application all the agencies could share. Complicating matters was the state government, which would OK the application and then tell Caldwell County the application did not have enough information. Hill would then have to get computer technicians to change the application.

"It will likely be a never-ending process," he said.

But the process is worth the effort, he said.

"It took us a long time to get where we are today, and the process is still changing," he said. "It's not a cure-all and you've got to know its limitations."

But if all the agencies and clients get on the same page in Beaufort County, the project will work, he said.