Reducing Paper In Your Small Business Office And Document Management
During the past twenty years small business has moved away from keeping lots of paper files
, but are we managing our documents any better? Chances are that your business is losing valuable correspondences every day.Back then you'd meticulously bind every document into a file and then put it into the appropriately labelled hanging section in your filing cabinet. If you were that way inclined you'd put everything in writing in a fax or a letter. If you needed to refer to something then you'd walk to the filing cabinet.These days you'll send off an email that ends up in your sent items, which no-one else has access to. When you receive an email you might delete it after reading it, or move it into your own private folder structure if you're really well organised. Some people might even print them out and file them somewhere that no-one else would think to look because they're not used to paper filing systems.The better solution is to implement a software system based around your clients or projects to collect your emails, letters, faxes, spreadsheets, quotes and anything else that you would have put into a filing cabinet in days gone by.Many software companies have solutions for exactly this. A good quality system will seemlessly tie in with your word processor, spreadsheet and other applications. In our office we use a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) from a very well known software company. The system is integrated with our email program, which means that we simply select the client as we're about to send the email or when it comes in. We can even automatically program the system to file emails as they come in and go out.The same thing can be done with other applications like Word Processors.Most people automatically think about setting up network shares on their office server and creating a folder structure. This is a good start, but it's not going to give you the more advanced features that a good CRM or document management system will give you. With our system, not only can we link documents to clients, but in the one screen where we keep our client details, we can easily see a history of emails, other documents, phone calls etc. and we can see who created them and when.Scanning of paper then comes into the discussion. Running out and buying a scanner and putting a bunch or jpgs onto the network server is again, better than keeping lots of paper files. But it's not very secure or well organised.Version management is another feature of document management systems. Again this isn't something so easily done with a simple network share.Document management systems usually also include the ability to check documents in and out. What this means is that you can control who's working on the current version of a document, so that you don't get splitting of versions between different contributors. It also means that you can check a document out to your laptop and work on it while you're out of the office and check it back in on return.In conclusion, it's possible to create a single repository of your different types of documents and to make the system work to help you run your business more efficiently.Reducing Paper In Your Small Business Office And Document Management
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