The Importance Of Switching To An Electronic Document Storage System
Document storage is becoming a growing problem for many different places of business in the United States. To put it simply, many places simply do not have the resources to store as many documents as they have. Fortunately, there is a solution and it lies in technology. Storing the important documents that your company might have on a digital platform instead of in a physical form can present the answer to this problem, and can be done in a number of different ways, from recruiting digital scanning services or even just scanning on site.
The paper document has become wildly inefficient and even more wasteful. After all think about it like this: we’re cutting down so many trees for inessential documents all around the world. If we just switched to scanning on site and reduced our use of paper documents, we’d be able to save quite a bit of paper – and quite a bit of time. On top of being far from environmentally friendly, working with a completely paper filing system when it comes to important company documents is honestly, in many ways, a recipe for disaster. Paper filing systems are often not as secure as they should be and there is so much room for error that one error – or many, in the case of some paper filing systems – is more likely to happen than to not happen.
When documents are filed through the use of a paper filing and storage system, the process of filing often takes far more time than its worth, time that is wasted (though most frequently very unintentially) during office hours. In fact, on average, it takes about and at least five minutes if not even more to go to a file cabinet and actually locate the document that you are interested in or need to use. This time only increases if the document has been misfiled, as happens to three percent of all documents – and more than seven percent of all documents are simply just lost altogether, never to be found again (something that is, of course, hugely detrimental to the process of filing documents for future use and incredibly counterintuitive to the working world). With as many as four trillion paper documents currently in use in the United States (a number that is only expected to grow in the years that are to come, paper filing systems can be expensive, particularly when documents also end up getting lost, as is bound to happen at some point in time. In fact, it will cost as much as twenty dollars to store one single document that is never misplaced. When it comes to a misplaced document or a document that has even become permanently lost, it can cost a total of one hundred and twenty dollars. When lost and misfiled documents are commonplace, this amount of money begins to very quickly add up.
Switching to a digital system and beginning the process of scanning on site can very much help to reduce the costs that have become associated with paper filing systems. In fact, beginning the process of scanning on site, though scanning on site can certainly be tedious, is well worth the end result, as you will save both time as well as money alike. In fact, when docusign and other such electronic signing methods are used, documents are typically returned as much as eighty percent faster than they would have been had another paper system of filing and signing been in places instead. Because of this and more many other reasons, more than seventy five percent of all businesses are looking to pursue such methods of electronic storage and the like from scanning on site to scanning microfilm to converting documents and converting microfiche.
From scanning a file to converting documents, there are many ways in which we are able to move to fully electronic system of storing out electronic documents, both in a workplace as well as in our lives (which are not to be discounted in any way, of course). Electronic storage is truly the way of the future for many.