Managing Company Documents in the Paperless Office

Every business produces thousands of documents. Invoices, memos, receipts, and the presence of all the other essential documents creates a situation: where do you store all this paper? The file cabinet was a good solution for this, but what happens when you fill one up? Do you just get another? And another? And another?

Today, there are powerful paperless solutions for businesses that allow them to manage all of their documents digitally. Today, we will look at what solutions are necessary to take your business paperless.

Printing
Before we get into the paperless office, we have to mention that printing costs have continued to rise, and while they may not seem prohibitive to the success of a business, they can force an organization to have a massive line-item in their budget that, with the help of technology, they simply don’t need. Not only do organizations pay for printers, paper, and ink/toner, they also pay for staff to collate all this information and file it away. These costs can add up over time and really hamstring a company’s ability to have quick access to information when they need it most.

Document Management
Document management is the act of storing copies of the documents a business creates/receives in a cloud-based searchable database. Not only does a document management system cut down on printing costs, it also presents an organization the ability to save money in clerical costs.

Make no mistake, implementing a document management system is relatively expensive to begin with, but once the system is in place, the only true cost is that of the recurring monthly cost of the hosting platform. The documents your company creates are saved right into the document management system as PDFs, while any paper documents you have to be digitized into searchable PDFs for them to work on the system.

Document Digitization
Over the past several years is the act of digitizing documents has taken off. Essentially, document digitization is the act of scanning all the documents that a company takes on to store in a database. When a member of your staff needs a document, they simply search the document management system that has been implemented for keywords associated with the document in question.

Security
As with any cloud computing initiative, data security has to be a priority for the document management system. Many useful document management platforms come with integrated access control, while other options utilize biometric security or two-factor authentication for system access.

If your organization wants complete control over your document management system, hosting your own private cloud database is an option, but be certain that the costs of implementing a self-hosted document management system are more substantial, and could be prohibitive to implementing the solution.

With the document management system in place, you can easily access all the documents you need from any location with an Internet connection on any number of devices, speeding up operations considerably.

If you would like more information about implementing a document management system, or you would like to talk to one of our IT experts about the type of options you have for managing your company’s data, contact Walsh IT Group today at (832) 295-1445.