Provided By: Business2Community
Businesses should always be looking for opportunities to become more efficient and reduce costs. One simple way of doing this is to digitize your paper documents. Document Scanning is an efficient option for businesses for a wide variety of reasons. Here are just five examples.
More Office Space
Document scanning can transform your office, reducing the amount of paperwork and unnecessary filing cabinets. The amount of office space freed up by digitizing your documentation can be huge, and, to underline this, the information stored on one DVD alone can replace nearly 30 filing cabinets.
Consequently, office space is freed up and can be utilized in new and more effective ways. Businesses can:-
- Re-use their office space for staff to focus on more profitable, core business activities. Fitting in additional workstations and people, avoiding costly office moves due to lack of space.
- Move to a smaller office and benefit from lower rental costs
- Enjoy their new office space and boost employee productivity, with improved conditions, more space and a less cluttered office environment, staff will be happier.
Secure Document Storage
Data security and protection is a key issue for businesses to consider. There is a greater risk of paper documents being damaged, stolen, or lost through fire, flood, or theft.
- Scanning your documents offers improved security, peace of mind and data protection compliance for the business.
- Scanned images can be securely stored in an online document management system, with security access at a user or role level. Documents can be easily shared with users in multiple offices and locations, providing secure, flexible access.
- A full electronic audit trail can be provided, showing a detailed user access history.
- Digital documents can be regularly backed up, providing continuity for your business. For businesses that like to rely on their own backup methods, a scanned document is still a better option than a paper document. If a scanned document is saved on a computer, and the files are backed up on CDs, DVDs, or a memory stick, then even if the computer suffers a fatal crash this will not be catastrophic. For any business the permanent loss of documents can prove to be traumatic, and have a significant impact financially. The chances of this happening are far greater with paper documents than they are with documents that have been scanned and backed up.
Documents that have been scanned and then stored digitally will last a long time. The documents won’t deteriorate over time, as is often the case when paper documents are going through different pairs of hands. Many years after a document has been scanned it will still remain in its original pristine condition.
Environmentally Friendly
In an increasingly environmentally friendly age scanning your documents helps a business move towards having a paperless office. For offices that have always relied on a great deal of paperwork, the change to a paperless office can be very dramatic, but also very helpful in terms of the overall running of a business. Less paper is produced, proving friendlier to the environment and also helping to reduce business costs for photocopying and stationery. Physical transport of documents can also be cut, helping your carbon footprint.
Improve Customer Service and Save Time
Many businesses spend large amounts of time searching through paperwork for customer information, which can delay projects and affect customer service response times. Digital documents can:-
- Be found quickly and easily using a simple keyword search. An often frustrating aspect of working in an office is being buried underneath a pile of paperwork. As a result there’s a greater likelihood of an important document being mislaid, or taking ages to find. When a file is stored on a computer these problems should no longer be an issue.
- You can choose how you want your scanned documents organized, whether by name of client, date, etc. The creation of a relevant folder, or by using your computer’s search facility, will mean that finding the particular scanned document will be achieved quickly and easily.
- Over the course of a year, the amount of time saved on document searches will be considerable, and aid a company’s efficiency. Searching in vain to find a paper document will be consigned to history, and you will now be able to find related documents from years or even decades ago with just a few clicks of a mouse.
- Scanned documents can be easily distributed among other members of staff in an office, and, better still, this can be done instantaneously. Photocopying documents and then distributing them to employees, for instance, would be noticeably more time consuming and costly than digital documents.
Scanned documents save time and money, can be stored more securely, are easier to find and are good for the environment. All in all, replacing paper documents with scanned versions makes good business sense.
To learn more about our document scanning services, click here!