By As a business grows an owner has to think about more and more things. There are always multiple plates to keep spinning, with different regulations to adhere to, products and services to devise and futureproof, employees to train and to keep happy, a customer base to grow, suppliers to maintain strong and honest relationships; the list goes on and on. Why should your growing business consider scanning and archiving old physical and paper documents? The answer is a simple one – it will help you to streamline your operations and to ensure that you are as efficient as possible moving forward.
Every business suffers with the problem of what to do with its paper waste. Think about the amount of paper that every single individual gets through in an office environment. There are notepads full of daily scribbles, invoices and bills created for and from suppliers and customers, marketing literature, official documents relating to the formation of the business, and many other types of documentation.
Knowing what to do with all of these documents is troubling to say the least. At best it can cause a hindrance in terms of how to manage and process certain tasks when there is a need to locate and use a specific document, at worst it can create a massive section of a workplace that is essentially ‘dead’, where no profit-making activities can take place due to the amount of storage required to house documents.
This is where scanning and archiving documents comes in incredibly handy. Depending on how much backlog of physical folders and documents you have in your workplace this could take anything from a few days to a few months, but as you work through the process of scanning and digitising historical documents you’ll experience first-hand the transformative effect it has on how smooth and efficient your business can actually be.
From this point you should also implement a system of daily working where all new documents that are created are done so digitally (unless there is a real necessity to create and store an original physical copy for a legal reason or other purpose). This helps to speed up all processes within your organisation. For instance, if there is a need for one person to locate and use a single document relating to a single client or supplier, a digital copy within a secure network of your choosing, can be located within seconds. This speeds up the process and makes for greater levels of efficiency and productivity, which in turn leads to happier customers and larger profits over time.
Always work with a company that can provide you with a sensitive paper and document shredding service, as well as access to a digitisation programme where you can move into a new era of transparency and efficient working practices. It makes a massive difference to clear away space to use it in a positive way, rather than just to store old documents, and digitisation ensures faster, more efficient working on a daily basis.
