How much time is spent on messy documents? An average worker spends 50% of their workday going through documents, arranging, preparing, and organizing them. On a yearly level, that amounts to a lot of wasted hours.
It’s not only time-consuming; the time spent looking for documents is a wasted opportunity. Opportunities that could be better used preparing for meetings or strategically planning out company goals.
Document Management For Small Businesses
This is where document management comes in – solving this problem by organizing your business’ document workflow and adding structure to how employees handle their documents.
What exactly is document management? Well, the AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) defines it as “the use of a computer system and software to store, manage and track electronic documents.”
Basically, document management is a system to organize and secure documents digitally, and it’s changing the way we treat digital files.
Benefits Document Management For Small Businesses
Why are we just talking about small businesses? What about the rest? Are only small businesses affected by disorganized documents? The answer is no, businesses of all sizes need proper document management. But for small businesses, it’s more important.
Think about the better-equipped companies – even if they have a lot of documents scattered throughout their systems, at least they have the resources to purchase the latest software and file storage solutions. Smaller companies don’t have that luxury – especially ones just starting out.
Small businesses need a system that works for them – without breaking the bank. And that’s where document management comes in. Small companies have an even greater incentive to implement a digitized system because they don’t have much to lose and so much to gain from it.
Also, it’s important to keep in mind that a small business can easily fall through, especially during the first few months. According to BLS data, 1 in 5 small businesses fail within 12 months. To ensure success, small businesses need all of the help they can get.
What Can Document Management Help You With?
Successful document management has a plethora of benefits for businesses of all sizes and types. There are three categories of benefits:
The Document System Itself – What does a document management system look like? A lot depends on the size and type of business you have, but in general, it’s an organized system that includes metadata tagging, labels, folders, and other features to organize documents into one central system.
A document management strategy can even combine software that will help employees handle their document workflow without taking time out of their day to do so. Software like this includes the ability to tag, secure, and encrypt documents.
This also makes it easy for employees who are physically in the office to check on how they handled a document and gather data on it. Document management also makes it easier to locate documents by using keywords, metadata tags, and labels to search for them.
Digitalizing Documents – How much money is your business losing out on because of wasted time and effort? What about the costs associated with printing and scanning documents? It’s not easy keeping track of how much money is being lost from disorganized documents.
However, with a document management system in place, you can easily see how much money and time is being saved because employees aren’t wasting it hunting down documents. Documents will also be stored digitally instead of occupying space on the server or your computers.
Saving Documents
What good is a document management system if it doesn’t save you from having to spend more money on additional storage space?
One of the biggest costs associated with businesses is the amount of time and money required to maintain their servers. By digitalizing documents, they’ll be stored in one central location without taking up any space on the server.
As a small business, you want to keep every cent you make – and a good document management system will help prevent money from going out the door in terms of wasted resources.
Tools That Can Help You Organize Documents
There are many different tools you can utilize to make a document management strategy work for your business. Some of the most popular document management tools include:
Microsoft Sharepoint – Microsoft Sharepoint is a collaboration platform for organizing, securing, and managing documents. Businesses can use it to create teams and keep track of where their projects are in the workflow process.
It also has features that allow employees to communicate with each other about their roles in the project. Plus, there’s easy file sharing, so you can easily give people access to documents.
Box – Box is an industry-leading cloud content management platform. It’s fast, easy to use, and can be accessed from anywhere. It also has access controls that let you manage which employees have access to different types of documents—without having to set up additional file-sharing accounts. And it makes collaboration easier because everyone on the team can access any document from wherever they are.
Templafy – When you have a lot of documents to manage, it can be difficult keeping track of their metadata tags. Templafy is a document management tool that uses artificial intelligence to help you create the proper metadata tags for your documents. Plus, it makes it easy to find and secure sensitive information so you don’t have to worry about losing anything.
Draftable – Figuring out how a document has changed from one version to another sounds like a simple task. However, you’d be surprised to know how much time such a simple undertaking can waste when a document is long or complex.
Draftable is a tool designed to help small businesses analyze and compare documents. It allows you to compare everything from Excel files to PDFs in a matter of minutes. Since Draftable highlights all of the differences automatically, you’ll never have to worry about scanning documents for hours.
Closing Thoughts
With a proper document management strategy in place, your business will be ready to recover from any type of disaster that strikes. This is important because it can save you time and money spent hunting down lost documents. It also makes it easier to rebuild without having to worry about where information is stored or who needs access to it.
While document management can seem like an impossible feat for small businesses, all you need to do is choose the right tool that fits your needs, and it will be much easier to manage documents in a way that provides structure, saves money, and makes business operations run more efficiently.