Small business owners are increasingly getting technologically savvy. Yet when it’s time to cut costs, they could commit the mistake of not spending on technology that could actually save them money. One such example is in the area of managing information, using an electronic document management system. “Why have a document management system?” you might ask.
Reasons why you absolutely need electronic document management
- Paperless advantages: Paper based documents are vulnerable to wear and tear. Electronic documents are not handled physically. So if you scan paper based documents into a document management database, you make them permanent. The documents will stay there until you delete them. Not only that, electronic documents can be shared via email for easy collaboration. Your small office would be far more efficient using electronic documents than relying on paper based ones.
- Saves you costs and time: A study by Coopers and Lybrand reveals that while it costs $20 to file a document, it costs $120 to find a misplaced document and $220 to replace a lost document. Document management systems allow you to OCR and index scanned paper documents. This helps you retrieve documents in a jiffy, based on their text content. So you can view the document right on your desktop without getting up from your seat to fetch it from where it is physically stored. And unlike paper, you never have to file back a document after referring to it. Put together, all this saves precious hours of your productive time.
It also reduces your need for paper and other office supplies, thereby saving costs. Also, chances of documents getting misfiled are almost eliminated. However, if you do not have a reliable document management system in place, then a document getting misplaced or lost could turn out to be quite expensive for your small business. Using small business document management software like Sohodox can protect your business from such hidden costs. - Easier to backup and recover: If most of your documents are in paper form, they are at great risk in disaster situations. It could almost cost you your entire business if these documents are destroyed. This makes it important to back them up. But photocopying paper based documents can be quite expensive. A better way to backup your documents is to digitize them using a scanner and storing the scanned documents using document management software. Sohodox is one solution that lets you scan and store documents as well as backup your documents online as well as offline. So in case of disaster, when your business recovers, you can restore your documents and resume work quickly.
Remember, you’re not choosing to invest in document management software only because it offers some great, useful features. You’re choosing to invest because it saves you time, costs and your documents themselves – and potentially your small business too (in disaster situations). So isn’t it time to see how Sohodox works for you!
