It doesn’t matter whether you are a small or large business, managing documents is so important. You might have employee and customer information that needs to be kept confidential and secure, you might need to keep track of paperwork for tax and audit purposes, or you might simply want to eliminate all that paper from your office. Here are a number of effective document management solutions for business owners.
Off-site management
If you can’t keep documents securely within your own office premises, or prefer not to, consider an off-site solution. There are companies which provide facilities where your documents can be kept safe. This not only frees up your own office space but you know all confidential information is safely stored away.
These off-site storage facilities may have more security than your office so if you do need to protect confidential information, this is your best bet.
Digital storage
Going digital is a great way to clear clutter from your office and keep your important documents safe. There are plenty of companies that will handle scanning and sorting of your documents – document scanning from Kelly’s Storage is one example.
When choosing document management software, make sure you take your time to ensure you get what’s right for your business and the documents you’ll be storing.
Cloud-based storage
This is similar to digital storage in that you scan in all your documents. The benefit of cloud storage is that it’s backed up and stored off-site. This means that if something were to happen at your office – such as a server failure or fire – your documents won’t be lost.
Cloud storage often comes with digital storage options and you should always consider this because backing up your documents is a must for any company. If you do lose important data then this could cost you huge amounts of money.
Secure storage
There are firms out there who specialise in secure storage. While they might not look after documents exclusively, these can be a great option if you need somewhere close to your office that’s easily accessible whenever you need something.
You could also use this storage to keep other things safe such as disk drives containing important data. Backing up your data is imperative for safeguarding your business’ information. Having disk drives off-site containing your back ups is a great way to ensure it’s safe.
In-house management
If you have a large business, it might be worth considering in-house management of important documents. You’ll need somewhere secure to store all this information as well as the necessary security such as CCTV.
The same goes for digital storage, it’s possible to do this in house and it might be cheaper to do so if there’s a lot of work to be done. If you do handle your own document storage, you should also make sure everything is backed up. Something happening to your data is unlikely but it’s always better to be safe than sorry.