The more your business grows, the more documents you’ll eventually accrue, and the more paperwork you collect. This isn’t a bad thing in and of itself – it’s a sign of success! – but it can lead to document overflow and make finding a particular file or paper difficult or impossible.
However, your organization can alleviate this issue by investigating document management systems.
Wrong Versions of Files Worked On
Nothing can set a day’s worth of progress back faster than employees working on the wrong version of a specific file. This is a huge time sink and can result in significant losses in time, money, and employee productivity.
It’s all too easy for an employee to send the wrong version of the document to a client or colleague, leading to future confusion and more time debt accrual when you could be progressing your firm’s goals. Either buying an existing document management system or building a SharePoint document management system are great ways to solve this problem permanently.
Manual Document Merging
Company employees are often forced to merge documents manually when they don’t have an efficient document management system instead. It’s a massive time sink because employees have to cross-reference both versions (or more than two versions) of a single document over and over by hand.
Document management systems are much more effective solutions to this need since they can automatically merge different versions of a document and much more accurately catch any discrepancies between versions.
Can’t Find the Right Document When Necessary
Larger companies often have thousands of documents to sift through. If someone at your organization needs a particular file or document, a clerk or another employee could spend hours looking for that document depending on how well organized your files already are.
In contrast, efficient document management systems can help you easily access any documents necessary, and at much faster speeds compared to even the most skilled human worker. Furthermore, document management systems always include search functions, allowing clerks to look up documents they need at a moment’s notice.
Office Space Taken Up by Traditional Document Storage
The more files you have, the more space you have to dedicate to cabinets and other storage solutions for those physical documents. Even the most compact file cabinets will eventually occupy a lot of space in your office as you buy more of them – that’s space that could be better used for seating clients, for employee desks, and other uses.
Document management systems allow you to compress all of your files into digital versions, eliminating the necessity for excessive file cabinets. This also improves each document’s shelf life since the digital versions will not degrade over time like paper.
Insecure Document Storage
Lastly, efficient document management systems can benefit your organization by providing security. Regular document storage solutions are usually insecure and are thus vulnerable to unrestricted access. Document theft can harm even small companies.
Document management systems can provide standardized repositories and only allow authenticated organization members to access certain documents. Some systems even offer multilevel security provisions to protect high-level or sensitive documents from unauthorized access.
All in all, it’s clear that efficient document management systems are key tools that no business should be without.
