The documents used by a small business are incredibly important for the way the business runs. A document management strategy refers to the way that those documents are created, how they are organized and how they ultimately get stored and retrieved later. With a strategy that works for your business, you can save an enormous amount of time and money.
Looking at Current Strategies
Before changing your company's document management, it's important to assess the system the way it is right now. The pros and cons should be assessed so that you know what to change and what to keep. If much of your document management is being done with hard copies, chances are that there is some room for improvement when it comes to filing and storing those papers. A better management system would be to have one that allowed for documents to be both filed and retrieved in seconds.
Inventory Current Documents
Could you say right now about how many documents your company has stored? It would be pretty difficult to know that without a digital system. Before there are changes made, make an inventory of the current documents simply to see how many there are and how they might better be organized. It could be that organizing by date or industry is easier than your current method. Once you know exactly what you need from a better document management system, you can begin to put one in place.
Create Change
To implement a new document management system, all of the documents that will be kept will have to be scanned and digitized. This is also a good opportunity to get rid of files that no longer need to be kept. The new system will require an enormous amount of scanning, but the management of those scanned documents will be so easy that it's well worth that time upfront. There may be some documents that need hard copies as well as digital ones, and those hard copies can be refiled in the smaller space your fewer documents now require. Retrieving a copy can be done with just a few keystrokes while the hard copy is safely put away.
If your company needs a better document management strategy, contact us now to get started.
