Benefits of Digitizing Documents – business.com – Business.com
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As your business progresses from a startup to an established business, the volume of paper documents grows exponentially, and that stockpiled paperwork wastes space and is difficult to manage. One solution is to digitize everything; you can use digital conversion techniques to convert all of your business’s paper documents to electronic versions that are stored either on your own server or in the cloud. This allows you to manage documents more efficiently, without losing critical documents, thereby avoiding damage to your business’s credibility.
Document scanning, also called document imaging, is the process of capturing digital images of paper documents. The images of the physical documents are then transformed into a digital format using OCR conversion software. OCR, or optical character recognition, scans document images and turns them into text documents. This intelligent conversion allows documents to be searched with relevant keywords.
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As a small business owner operating on a shoestring budget, you need to slash redundant costs. Having to search through a vast volume of paper documents could result in lost productivity, as well as require additional space to safely archive it all, and those recurring costs add up.
Document scanning can help small businesses avoid those challenges and, in turn, save money in the long run. You can entrust a document scanning service provider to have paper documents, microfilms, plans, maps, blueprints and other media converted to a digital format. In addition to saving space, converting documents to digital formats makes your documents more secure because you can save them as read-only files, decide who can access each file and encrypt the data.
Digitized files are also easier to access and navigate, leading to improved customer service quality, increased productivity, quicker retrieval of relevant information and alleviation of fear about damaging critical physical documents.
If you have sensitive documents, such as those with financial information, you can use a redaction service to remove sensitive data from the digital files after the paper documents have been scanned.
A data keying service may also be useful after your documents are scanned. This type of service verifies the accuracy of scanned documents and manually inputs information, assuring minimal errors. Data keying allows you to conform to digital data retention stipulations. You just need to specify your preferred layout or format for the data. Digital files can then be incorporated seamlessly into your company’s database.
After all of your paper documents have been scanned and rendered editable, the paper versions can be destroyed, with the exception of documents required for statutory compliance and other legal purposes. The service provider can shred sensitive documents in bulk.
There are many advantages of digitizing your documents. Here are some of the benefits:
Scanning usually involves using a scanner lens to capture digital images of physical documents. However, basic scans of papers aren’t very useful; because they’re just digital images, all you can do is view them. A reputable scanning service can help you build on the basic functionality of these files by adding the following features:
Here are the different types of document scanning services:
There is really no limit to the types of documents you can digitize. If you are starting from scratch to convert all of your paper documents to electronic versions, it’s best to prioritize the following types of documents:
After you digitize the documents with a high-quality scanner, the next step is to enter the descriptive information needed to identify files. Using intelligent OCR, you can transform scanned images into readable text, and retrieve, read and share them using different apps.
There are hundreds of document digitization services you can choose from based on your business needs. At business.com, we researched document management services to find the best options for small businesses. To do so, we examined several important factors, such as cost, ease of use and storage capacity. Here are the document digitization and management services we selected as our best picks:
Here are some other popular document management systems:
Before choosing a document management system, consider your business’s requirements for storage space, sorting and search tools, and security.
Also, think about where you want the system hosted. Do you want an on-site solution or a cloud-based document service that’s managed by a third party?
Look for a service that allows you to set permission restrictions on certain files, because this lets you control which employees have access to certain documents. Additionally, a system that stores your documents in the cloud is ideal because users can access files from any device with an internet connection – an especially important functionality for businesses with remote employees.
The best document management software allows your team to work and collaborate seamlessly. You shouldn’t have to use multiple programs to manage your paperless documents. Make sure your application has imaging tools that work with your scanner, customizable document-creation templates and tools that automatically format scanned files to match office or industry standards. Having a range of workflow automation tools is helpful, as these tools allow you to create, edit, review and approve all scanned documents for your business. You also want a system that lets you import a variety of digital documents, like PDFs, word processing files, spreadsheets and image files.
Additional reporting by Simone Johnson.
