Investing in Document Management Software is one of the smartest moves a business can make. Increasing productivity and enabling a remote workforce while reaping an ROI is a move businesses can’t afford to miss out on.
In today’s climate, the need for digitally stored documents has become essential for virtually all businesses. With a growing number of employees working outside the office, secure access to company documents is a necessity. Maintaining paper documents has proven to be inefficient, a security liability, and costly to manage and maintain.
Luckily, document management software provides an invaluable solution and pays back in dividends. A study by Nucleus research found that SMBs saw an $8.55 return on every dollar invested in content management.
Most companies spend thousands of dollars alone on paper for employees to print and make copies of reports, e-mails, accounting statements, expense reports, tax forms etc. Additionally, the cost of purchasing and maintaining printers, copiers and faxes is expensive and unnecessary.
With a DMS, document creation, editing, signing, and sharing can be accomplished digitally. If your team uses Microsoft Office, they can continue to do so with the added benefits and functionality of document management.
Office space is a huge expense for businesses. Devoting square footage to house filing cabinets full of paper is a sunk cost. If you keep your archived documents in offsite storage you have the added expense of retrieval fees. Implementing a document management system on-site takes up minimal space for servers, or zero space and no maintenance if you deploy in the cloud.
Documents undergo revisions, amendments, and approvals. Performing these functions manually takes hours of time sharing, making changes, getting sign-offs, emailing reminders, and keeping track of the final document. Document Management version control ensures only one user can make changes at a time. Plus an audit trail notes every change made by every user. Automated workflows streamline approval process, eliminating tedious manual steps.
According to research by PricewaterhouseCoopers, knowledge workers spend up to half their time looking for information, and each year, the amount of data businesses create increases by more than 65 percent. With most DMS solutions, an intuitive search interface simplifies locating files and smart indexing technology is so advanced, documents file themselves away. Companies have no need to hire additional employees with the sole responsibility to scan, perform data entry, or search and retrieve documents. Document management also enables administrators to define user and role access privileges, so your entire staff can access exactly what they need within seconds.
It costs an organization an average of $20 to file a document, $120 to find a misplaced document, and $220 to reproduce a lost document. Paper documents are vulnerable to physical destruction from water leaks, fire, and theft. Digitizing and backing up your data is the best insurance policy your business can invest in.
