Written by Altec Products, Inc.
How many times have you gone looking for a document and spent minutes, hours or even days trying to track it down? Was it on someone’s desk? Was it misfiled? Or did you not find it at all and have to request it again from a vendor, or recreate it from scratch?
For decades, paper documents and filing cabinets have been the de facto method companies use to manage their information. Unfortunately, the pain and inefficiencies that comes from working with paper is not only incredibly frustrating, but costs your company calculable time and money.
But it doesn’t have to be this way – companies globally are transitioning to paperless offices, moving from paper to a digitized document infrastructure. That’s where a document management solution comes into play – by providing a way to store documents and translate document content into meaningful data that can be used throughout your business processes.
The benefits of implementing a document management solution are substantial, delivering greater:
#1 - Access
With paper, you often cannot find the documents you need in the office, and if you’re remote you simply cannot do your job. This was a HUGE impediment for companies who had to send their office employees home during the pandemic. Going paperless means:
- you will no longer need dedicated rooms or off-site storage for all your paper files. A document management solution not only provides a central repository for storing all your documents electronically, but employees can access them anywhere, at any time, and from any device.
- documents can be captured via scan, fax, email, barcode, etc.
- powerful search capabilities allow you to find what you need in seconds.
- invoices, sales orders, contracts, resumes and more can be approved electronically.
There’s simply no more hunting and searching for what you need, it’s all there at your fingertips.
#2 - Visibility
Taking everything digital also means you can automate and streamline workflows, providing complete visibility into where every document is in any process. Most manual tasks, such as processing invoices, expense reports, contracts, and so on can be automated. A document management solution allows companies to take a high-level view of business processes and identify bottlenecks and opportunities for more efficiency. For example, you can:
- automatically index data on an invoice when it enters the system.
- accounts payable no longer has to key and re-key data.
- automatically perform a 3-way match with other documents related to that invoice.
- manages approvals with pre-configured workflows that route the invoice through the process until complete.
Alerts and reminders to approvers means invoices aren’t misplaced on desks or waiting on a manager to return to the office for approval. And all the data syncs seamlessly with your ERP ensuring your data is up-to-date and accessible. Overall, greater visibility and eliminating human intervention in many processes significantly reduces error and increases efficiencies, allowing employees to have more time to take on other tasks.
#3 - Control
Going paperless and automating processes naturally allows companies to have better control in so many ways:
- administrators can create rules for who can access, approve or distribute documents and when.
- workflows can be monitored to ensure documents are moving through processes unimpeded.
- tracking all these activities makes financial reporting and auditing incredibly easy.
Essentially, it eliminates operational inefficiencies so your organization has better management and control over day-to-day tasks in every department.
Greater access, visibility and control of your teams’ business processes are immense benefits of a document management solution, but if that’s not enough to convince you, many companies experience ROI well within the first year. With that, the last two reasons to go paperless are measurable savings of both time and money.
#4 & 5 - Time & Money
Just think of the time you won’t have to spend capturing, processing, delivering or retrieving documents to do your job. For example, some of our customers have saved up to 95% of the time it takes to process and pay invoices with DocLink. With this time savings many organizations are able to reallocate staff to other tasks and are able to grow substantially without needing to add new employees.
The time savings directly equates to money savings by enabling your teams to work more efficiently. There are also hard costs that you save by getting rid of all that paper. A document management solution eliminates the need for outside storage fees and turns storage rooms and warehouses into usable office space. And not only are your paper costs reduced, but the cost to maintain your printers is minimized as well. Postage and courier fees are also eradicated since documents can be sent electronically instead.
As you can see, the old adages that time is money and do more with less are possible. Transitioning to a paperless office is attainable, and digitizing your documents is the first step to transforming your workplace and ultimately driving business forward.
About Altec Products Inc.
Altec Products Inc. has developed a document management solution, DocLink, that helps companies better manage their data, automate workflows, streamline all vital document processes, and integrates with your Sage ERP solution.
