Can Small Businesses Afford a Document Management System?

Small businesses cannot think of utilizing most benefited solutions only due to the budget constraint and document management is one of them. Large organizations take help of many service providers which best suit to their requirement to fulfill critical, continuous, and time-consuming processes so that they can concentrate more on their core business area. Small businesses can also use these services to reap several benefits and let us discuss few points to decide how to afford it.

Comparing Costs among all the available Service Providers

There are a variety of service providers available in the market dealing with any type of documents, and those which are less costly can be considered as perfect for small businesses. Organizations that have a tight budget, they can target small and efficient service providers.

Reviewing the features provided by Service Providers

Small businesses should also check with costlier service providers as well. Normally the service providers which are costly provide many advanced features and the small businesses may not need all the features. So, they can check with the outsourced company to provide a solution as per their need in case they facilitate such options. It will definitely reduce the cost and also less time will be required to implement these features. The outsourced companies may be into many types of record management processes targeting to larger companies, but the small organizations may need only a few specific type of records to be managed.

Finalize a definite Budget

Before searching for any service provider outside, the company should have a fixed and definite budget in hand to move forward and have a clear goal of finding any outsourcing company within that budget range.

Review the Budget

The small businesses should check with in house employees regarding the time and money factor involved in managing the documents like storing, accessing, modifying and sharing. It should also include the time taken to resolve any document related issue. Then, the company can think of outsourcing if it is the need of the hour and release the burden of this tedious task from in house employees.

Taking account of Long-term Benefits

By outsourcing this task, small businesses can avail following benefits:

Retrieval of documents will become easier and fast because of the usage of techniques like document indexing. The Traditional way of storing documents have a common problem due to many versions of a single document. In most of the cases, the document retrieved is wrong due to multiple versioning of the file and it also takes much time which will affect the productivity. But, by using latest methodologies the documents are tagged with different search terms which make the retrieval process quite easier.

It reduces document storage space by using document scanning which is nothing but the image or pictorial representation of available documents. It creates the base for storing the document which then can be used further for document conversion and document remediation

• – Sharing and collaboration among employees will be much easier
• – Data is secured and private
• – Easier plan for backup and disaster recovery

Thanks to data indexing, the documents can be accessed easily and quickly during audits as well as on-site reviews. There are two types of indexing available depending on the requirement and those are ordered index and hash index. Factors like access type, access time, insertion time, deletion time and space overhead decide which type of indexing need to be chosen.

Overall, it is highly needed to manage organization documents properly irrespective of the size of the organization. As electronic documents make the process easier to access anywhere and work on them within a secured network, every organization should go with digitization. It will provide numerous safeguards against many common issues that almost all companies cannot avoid.