For business owners, stagnation is never good enough. You need a growth mindset to run a business, which means knowing how to maximize your time. The bad news is that business gets more and more competitive every year, which makes growth more challenging. The good news is that these days, you have a long list of tools at your disposal to help your company stay ahead of the competition. As long as you know what they are and leverage them to your advantage, you’ll always have opportunities to take your business to the next level. When you aim to improve your business, it makes sense to take advantage of all the tools at your disposal, and one of the most important tools you can use is document management software.
That’s because the best business tools are the ones that target multiple improvements at the same time, and document management lets you do that. By improving your efficiency, productivity, and communication, you can take your company to new levels and see new growth all across the board. And by taking advantage of your document management software, you’ll see increases in these areas almost immediately. Saving time means saving money, and digital document management helps with both. Here’s how.
Managing Files
Have paper documents taken over your office? If so, you may be losing time that you could be spending on more productive tasks. The time that you spend on paper documents adds up over time. As a matter of fact, tasks like producing, reproducing, filing, and retrieving paper documents can easily consume hours out of the week, and that’s only if you don’t count the time spent looking for files that are permanently lost.
If you don’t use document management software, your paper documents are probably wasting your time in more ways than you realize. For instance, just working in an office with a paper-cluttered desk can reduce your overall productivity. Multiple studies have shown that a cluttered environment harms people’s ability to get work done. Get rid of those stacks of paper, and you may find that your mind has cleared and can focus more easily on the task at hand.
Then there’s the matter of finding the files that you need, which also takes a large chunk of time. Document management software would find those files for you. You’d just need to take a few seconds to search for them on your computer or even your phone. Without a digital document system, you have to find your files the old-fashioned way, and that process can take several minutes even under the best of circumstances.
Instead of allowing paper to control your work environment, shift your files to document management software and regain that time. Document management backs up your files automatically, indexes them by your choice of terms, and allows you to search for what you need in seconds. In other words, no more lost documents and no more hour-long searches looking for them. Instead, you can shift your focus to more productive and less tedious tasks that can help you grow your business and reach your goals. You may be surprised at just how much time you can save.
Moving Documents
Document management software can also reduce the burden of moving documents. In most companies, documents travel across departments throughout each workday. Sometimes this means printing copies, signing and scanning them, and then sending them back. Or, in the case of invoices and requisitions, the documents are copied and mailed, and then the whole account waits until they return. The larger the company, the longer this process can take.
It gets even worse when you absolutely cannot move on to the next step until you get a particular signature. When this happens, you get stuck playing the waiting game, wasting your time at the office as you wait for a document to make its way back to your desk.
Then there’s the possibility of loss. Some documents get dropped or lost along the way to their destination. It’s not surprising, especially in companies that deal with a lot of paperwork. When someone carries armloads of documents from one place to another, they’re bound to drop a document at least once. They’ll either find the document, losing time in the process, or they’ll look for the document only to realize that it’s lost for good.
Document management software virtually eliminates these problems. That’s because document management software takes the wait time out of moving documents. Sending a request, invoice, or form is as simple as alerting the correct person to the location of necessary files in the system. Additionally, whichever team member owns the project can track the process online and address any slowdowns.
Automating Daily Tasks
Employees spend hours each week routing correspondence, filing forms, entering data, and reformatting documents. Companies can cut out this busywork with the tools in a document management software system. For instance, you might set your software to automatically standardize your documents according to your needs. In addition, using e-forms can eliminate the need for manual data entry. This way, you’ll save time and eliminate transcription errors. Spare your team the many daily tasks that feel unprofitable and take up valuable time by fully utilizing your document management software.
These are just a few examples of how your document software can save valuable time for your business. Of course, your document system can do more than just save time. The right document management system can also improve your regulatory compliance, disaster recovery protocols, and collaboration. Want to see what your document management system can do for you? The Vasion team is ready to help. Let us show you how document management can keep your business as efficient and thorough as possible. Get in touch with us today to start the conversation.