For any business to grow, it must expand or scale up its operations. This results in larger amounts of information being processed, resulting in more documents being created and exchanging hands. If you want your small business to grow, it is important to introduce electronic document management software early on so that when your hands are full, you need not worry about going paperless – you can focus on building and maintaining business relationships instead.
Why do people not mind paying tax but hate filing tax returns? Why do people not mind making monthly mortgage payments but they don’t particularly like the process of applying for loans? Simple – it’s the sheer paperwork involved. This despite the fact that you only file tax returns once a year. When you own and run a small business, you and your staff create, process, store, retrieve and exchange probably scores of documents every day. In the process, you buy a few filing cabinets to store those documents that you need to create but not necessarily use. How you wish a robot could take the document from you and file it away in the cabinet! Well, electronic document management software is that virtual robot, which will do this and much more for you, so that you can save precious office space, costs, effort and most importantly, that non-renewable resource every business person and employee seems to be pressed for – time.
Electronic document management is a better alternative to paper for several reasons, the chief among them being that it helps you convert documents from a tangible to an intangible form. This means that it brings to an end the replication of the document in its life cycle. Once the document is digitized, its paper version can be archived after which only the digital version of the document is used – be it to create copies, make annotations, tag them, move them across folders, transmit them (via email) etc.
Let us take the example of a management consultancy. The firm has been in existence for, say, 15 years. They have a huge archive of client files – both present as well as past ones. Every time there is a client meeting or some activity related to the client’s account, the clerk has to retrieve the client’s file from the alphabetically arranged filing cabinets. Every time the client is asked for a certain document, a copy of it is filed with the firm because the consultants need it for their records. For long standing clients, this can often run into several file of a hundred or more pages. Fitting those files in the same cabinet is not easy as they grow in volume. To study multiple documents at the same time, the consultants either need to keep flipping back and forth between the documents or else remove those pages from the file, study them and then file them back in – something that the clerk could easily have done.
The better way would be for the firm to get an electronic document management software and first scan all new records into the software application and index them. They could then use various search features to access documents faster. Also, documents could be shared with teams working on the same client’s account so that they are all updated on the latest activity. Once they settle into this new and more efficient way of working, they could begin scanning their entire paper archive. They could even set a cutoff date so that documents for clients whose agreements were created before that date would not be scanned but destroyed safely. Or they could specify a period, say, 6 years; documents for clients whose agreements were created before 6 years and on whose account there has been no activity in the last 2 years would not be scanned but destroyed using a safe method like fine shredding or powdering.
Electronic document management software can do much more than just scanning and archiving. But it begins here. Sohodox is an electronic document management software for small businesses that enables you to quickly convert all your paper based documents to electronic documents and to manage them more effectively. It is just the tool you need to propel your small business to grow, by focusing more on client relationships and less on documents – because electronic document management is not an end in itself but a valuable means to achieving your small business goals.