Are you looking into the possibility of having a paper-free office? Whether you are considering making the change for environmental reasons, for the hope of greater productivity or for a bit of both, you will be pleased to know that it has never been easier to have your documentation scanned and digitised.
Say goodbye to physical store rooms and huge archives of paper – these documents can be quickly and simply scanned. They can then be saved on your internal server or on the cloud so that they can be used electronically. Here we take a look at four of the most important benefits from document scanning for your business.
1. It frees up physical space
You might not realise how much physical space you can free up by concerting your physical documents into digital files. Many businesses dedicate a huge amount of space to their physical documentation, such as large filing cabinets and storage rooms. Switching to digital documents makes for a great deal of extra space.
This extra physical space could often be used far more productively within the business, for example, opening up the space for another office or providing room for additional employees to work. This can make an enormously amount of difference to businesses of all sizes. Switching from physical to digital documents could even provide you with a buffer for when you need to upsize your office. Considering that your office is one of your largest business expenses, this can allow for greater profit in the short term.
2. It’s easier to handle documents
There can be no doubt that one of the most frustrating aspects of physical documentation is the challenge of handling it. Large volumes of paper that are stored on your premises can be extremely unwieldy and time consuming to manage. Everything from locating and identifying the physical files from within storage, to the time spent photocopying, filing and re-categorising documents can be a tedious job. Not to mention that fact that it can actually call for an amount of manual labour in lifting heavy boxes.
A well organised and fully digitised collection of documents means that files can be searched and retrieved instantly. There is also much less in the margin for error. This can be a massive time saver as well as simplifying the whole system for your entire team. Document Scanning Specialists, Document Options say, ‘Document scanning releases staff to focus on core business activities without initial capital expenditure’. Rather than rooting through a box trying to locate a specific invoice for an hour, you can simply search for the invoice number and have it in seconds.
3. It improves your document security
It has never been more important to take your document security seriously. Whether you are protecting your company against break-ins, natural disaster or accidents, there is no doubt that your documents are more secure if they are stored on cloud servers, than if they are located in a box in your storage room.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) places the onus on businesses to properly protect their documentation to provide greater rights for the individuals who that data relates to. Companies can face very heavy fines if they fail to adequately protect their documents. It can be far easier to do this if all of your documents are digitised.
4. It’s easier to distribute information
If you have worked in an office with purely paper documents then you will probably be aware that paper distribution can be a cumbersome and slow process. Locating and retrieving the relevant document, as well as scanning and photocopying it can take a great deal of time. But the good news is that this whole scenario can be streamlined with digitising your documentation – and it has never been easier.
Rather than having to send paper documents to another department (or even a different office) – members of staff can access exactly the same documents in seconds electronically. This distribution can be carried in any number of ways – however it is convenient for your business. For example, the files can be saved in the cloud or on internal servers. Or files with restricted access can be disseminated to the relevant person.
With almost all businesses now relying on some form of cloud computing, it has never been easier to ensure that documents can be shared quickly and easily between team members.