Official documents sustain the history and legacy of every activity performed in an organisation. Irrespective of the domain, it is important that documents stay available and are ready to be fetched whenever required. After all, documents carry the data which assures the growth of any business. Add to this, paperwork is also required to adhere to the compliance standards set up by governing authorities. Hence, each and every document, be it less or more important, is an integral part of any organisation. Regardless of this expectation, documents tend to go missing; and that’s when problems ensue.
In the absence of the required documents, there might be damaging financial consequences for the company in question. From misplaced data, lowering income to delayed payments from clients, if a document is gone forever, earnings are potentially lost.
But how do documents go missing?
Documents might get lost for a variety of reasons. The most common reasons are that documents go missing even before they reach your workplace. Documents can get lost while being transported from one person to another or between departments. The delay in the movement of documents can also lead to potential loss of time and money.
If you’re lucky to never lose documents during transit, great. But they might end up going missing in your workplace anyway. With the number of documents that are seen on a daily basis, paperwork is bound to get misplaced in a pile. Documents are vulnerable to getting shuffled among others.
And yet, even when documents get indexed (offline or otherwise), there’s always a chance that they might get wrongly indexed due to human error. Documents get misfiled or jumbled. This is an unavoidable consequence of manual sorting and filing. This is not only time consuming but also requires great attention and quickness.
So, how do you stop documents from getting lost?
While there are multiple options to mitigate the risk of losing documents, the best, most cost-effective solution is implementing a document management solution (DMS).
A DMS like ShareDocs Enterpriser comes equipped with the tools to minimize document loss. You’ll be surprised at how well a document management solution can preserve and shield documents susceptible to getting lost/misplaced/misfiled.
And how does a DMS helps you from losing paperwork?
Great question.
For starters, DMS’ are made to store and manage a dizzying amount of documents. But DMS can also solve the problem of missing paperwork from its roots. Every document uploaded on a DMS has to be indexed in a standard, organised manner. This is done while also considering the process of retrieval and how search can be made simpler. Since every document is indexed, each and every document gets the attention that it deserves. It becomes easier to rank documents by their content and priority. Access to these documents can also be restricted keeping in mind roles that individuals play in an organisation.
Secondly, DMS can prevent documents from getting lost on their way to the office. Some document management solutions, like ShareDocs Enterpriser, come with a built-in workflow management system. In this module, users can upload a document that requires an approval. Instead of moving the physical copy from one place to another, electronic movement of files not just saves paper but also reduces the risk of paperwork being lost. Also, the electronic copy of the approval document stays in the DMS permanently, along with the history of approval. If required, a print copy of the approved document can also be taken and filed in the physical format. By configuring workflows that best suit your needs, there can never be a document that isn’t in the right hands, at the right place and right time!
And finally, a good document management solution comes with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool. The OCR tool can tremendously help with full text search in the off-chance that a document is indexed wrongly or has not been indexed yet.
A DMS with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) drives full text search. This feature helps a user sift through all documents based on their textual content. This comes handy in case of a scenario where a file experienced an indexing problem. OCR scans the text of all documents to help a user pull up the required file even if it gets misplaced somewhere among all the other files in the repository.
With so much to offer, a DMS can definitely prevent the large-scale repercussions of misplacing and losing important paperwork. Are you facing difficulties in managing your documents? Contact us to sort the issues right now!