Already and if your company lacks a digital document management strategy, you’re missing on a lot.
Paper-based documentation creates clutter and increases the risk of errors. Time and time again, research has shown that relying on a paper-based archive reduces employee productivity. Automated processes, on the other hand, can increase effectiveness by 50 percent or even more.
If you’re making your first steps in that realm, you’re probably wondering about the types of documents to digitize first.
This decision is an important part of digital document management. It will build the foundation of your data archive. You need to be strategic about the choices you make to reduce clutter and prevent the accumulation of new paper archives in the office.
Without further ado, here are some of the document types that you need to carry out a priority scanning and digitization on.
Digital Document Management: Start with Contracts
Contracts are documents that will probably remain unchanged for the entire duration of an interaction or at least for a certain period of time.
Such documents tend to be quite bulky and they occupy a lot of space in an archive. If you want to simplify document management in your enterprise, begin the digitization process by getting your contracts scanned professionally.
Legal document scanning comes with its specifics but if you employ the right professionals for the job, you’ll enjoy quality and you’ll meet all compliance requirements.
From that point forward, you can move on to digital contracts that are sealed with e-signatures. Digitizing contracts also improves the security of the sensitive information they contain and completely eliminates the need for manual filing and retrieval (both of which can be a nightmare in a busy enterprise that has hundreds or even thousands of contracts).
Invoices
Your digital document management strategy will also benefit from the scanning and transformation of paper-based invoices.
Invoices form the bulk of documentation for many companies out there, regardless of size or industry they represent.
There are many additional reasons why digitizing invoices now makes a ton of sense.
Once you have all of your paper-based invoices scanned, you can easily start creating digital invoices. Legally speaking, digital invoices carry the same weight. There are lots of bookkeeping and accounting software products that streamline invoice creation or the addition of new invoices to an archive.
If you use the services of an external bookkeeping firm, digital invoice creation and management will simplify collaboration and the exchange of vital information on monthly transactions.
Digital Employee Files Are a Must
Just ask your HR department about the biggest burden they face on a daily basis.
Chances are that record management will top the list.
Employee files and records are usually very bulky. Lots of papers have to be kept for a number of years to meet compliance requirements. This is one of the main reasons why most HR departments struggle with record management and lose a lot of time in the process.
Digitizing your existing HR dossiers will probably be a cumbersome task (depending on the number of people who have come into the organization and who have left over a certain compliance period). These documents, however, don’t have to be modified or edited often. This is why digitization makes a ton of sense. You can add HR files to your overall database and forget about them over the course of the retention period.
Official Business Correspondence and Strategic Documentation
As already mentioned, digital archives boost security and reduce the likelihood of sensitive data being stolen or leaked.
Keeping those facts in mind, think about the kinds of documents that contain the most delicate type of information.
Correspondence with clients and contractors will probably emerge as a possibility first.
Business correspondence plays an important role in everyday activities for all organizations, no exceptions. While most of this communication is already digital, there’s still some likelihood of important documents being sent by regular mail. In addition, some exchanges could be printed out and stored in an office archive for reference purposes.
The complete digitization of official business correspondence isn’t just a practical decision. It is absolutely vital to protect confidentiality and trade secrets.
The same applies to strategic documents like financial forecasts, business plans and audits.
You cannot risk jeopardizing such documents by simply having them laying around. High quality digital document management systems make it very easy to restrict the access to such files. In addition, you’ll get detailed logs to know who has viewed them and when. The document management system will also create regular backups to ensure disaster recovery in the case of unforeseen circumstances.
These are just few of the document types you need to think about digitizing as soon as possible.
Needless to say, your line of work could make other types of files more crucial. Take some time to consider what documents you use on a daily basis, what’s required for collaboration and which kinds of papers need better security. By going through such considerations, you’ll instantly know exactly what parts of the archive need to be prioritized.