Small Business Document Management

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Email

small business document managementEffective small business document management can make your life easier, and your business more agile. If you’re not familiar with the term document management, it refers to the conversion of paper documents to digital files. The way it makes your life easier is by making your important documents easier to find.

When you need a file on your computer, what do you do? You search for it using a file name or keyword. That’s what can be accomplished through digital document management. No more looking through folders and filing cabinets to find what you need. In addition, it makes documents nearly impossible to lose or damage.

It sounds like a lot of work at first, but in the end it will save you time, and saving time in business means saving money. If you don’t know where to start, I’ll give you some tips in this post on how to prepare your company for small business document management.

Small Business Document Management: Getting Your Company Ready

The first step to prepare your business for the digital document age is to prioritize which documents you want to convert from physical to digital. Chances are you’re not going to want to save and store every document in your office forever. To make this task feel less overwhelming, decide which documents are absolutely not necessary to convert to digital form.

Next, do the opposite and prioritize which documents are most essential to have in digital form. These include frequently accessed documents, and documents you can’t afford to lose or have damaged. Start with those and break them up into manageable chunks, such as grouping them by category or by department. This will turn a large task into several smaller micro-tasks and ultimately feel like less for your business to take on.

Having the Right Hardware for Small Business Document Management

There’s another side of document management that can have a profound impact on how efficiently the job gets done, and that’s having the right hardware. Many scanners and multifunctional machines are built for digital document management. In fact, they even come with their own software which can streamline the process even more.

If you anticipate having a lot of documents to scan on a continuous basis, it may be worth investing in a heavy duty scanner. Heavy duty scanners can speed up the process many times over with the ability to scan over 100 pages per minute.

Another benefit of having the right hardware is the quality. Think about your most important documents and how many of them contain rich color images. Without the right hardware you’ll end up with a poor quality reproduction of those images in digital form. With a commercial scanner there’s no loss in quality, some scanners may even improve the quality with their built-in image enhancing software.

Some of the best heavy duty scanners on the market right now are made by Fujitsu and Canon, both of which we’re happy to offer at Dean Office Solutions. If you’d like a recommendation for specific model based on your needs you’re welcome to get in touch with me any time through the contact page on our site.

Scroll to Top