As your business grows, so does the amount of information that flows throughout your organisation. Whether that’s client contracts, marketing plans or customer invoices, there are countless documents that you need to save for future reference. The only way to avoid a messy situation is to implement an efficient document management system and get your whole team on board with it.
Luckily, there are some existing document management practices that have been proven to work for companies of all shapes and sizes. In this article, we’ll share some of these document management strategies with you so that you can improve your processes and grow seamlessly.
Choosing a standard file format is essential to ensuring that your document management system is easily usable by everyone working for your business. If you haven’t yet decided on a standard file type, we highly recommend using PDFs.
The PDF format has countless benefits in a business context. For one thing, many free online PDF editors out there can help you make changes to your documents where necessary. This eliminates the need to have separate document templates and then convert each one to Word just to perform minor edits.
Another benefit of the PDF format is that it’s universal. The primary goal of building a document management system is to provide your entire organisation with easy access to the resources they need to perform their jobs. By keeping your documents as PDFs, you can ensure that anyone can use them, no matter what device or software they’re using. What’s more, PDFs are also easily shareable, which removes potential roadblocks in internal communications. By adopting PDFs as your standard file format, you can ensure that your resources are easily editable, viewable, and shareable.
Combining digital and physical document management practices is vital if you want your business to be agile while shielding against potential disasters. Start by settling on a standardised digital document storage platform for your organisation. Your choices include Google Drive, Dropbox and Document360. Then, train your staff to use your chosen platform and ensure they’re aware of basic cybersecurity measures, such as two-factor authentication and recognising phishing attempts.
For safety reasons, it’s also a good idea to print out physical backups of your most important documents. You might have the best cybersecurity measures in the world, but it’s impossible to protect yourself 100% against cyber threats like hacking, phishing and simple human error on the part of your team. This has been demonstrated time and again by various high-profile security breaches at big corporations. By combining physical and digital systems, you receive the convenience benefits of digital document management with the security of old-fashioned hard copies.
Strategically managing employee access to your various internal resources is vital to bolstering security while still ensuring that everyone has access to the information that they need, which is necessary to achieve operational excellence. One simple access management practice is to carefully determine who has the password to your data management platform. This privileged group might only include management-level employees, or your entire organisation, depending on your business’s structure and culture. You can also use a tool like LastPass to grant certain team members access without giving them the password.
Another strategy is to create sub-folders within your document management platform and password-protect each of them. This allows you to grant access on a need-to-know basis. What’s more, you can even manage access on the document level by adding passwords to your most sensitive documents. By carefully determining who has access to which resources, you’ll not only bolster security but also prevent information overload on the part of your team.
Any document management system needs to be clearly organised in order to be useful, particularly if your business is growing rapidly. You can do this by simply creating folders within your overall document management platform and giving them descriptive names.
An easy way to organise your documents is to do so by department. For instance, you might create a folder for your marketing team in which you can store your various marketing strategies and brand collateral. Similarly, you can have a separate folder for your sales team that includes data on specific leads.
A logical method of organisation is crucial if you're looking to create a document management system that drives business growth. What this looks like in practice will differ slightly from business to business, so find what works for you and stick to it.
Implementing a regular backup and recovery plan is essential for protecting your business’s documents against data loss. No matter how reliable your document management system is, unforeseen issues like accidental deletion, software failures or cyberattacks can occur.
If you can automate your cloud backups, even better. Automated cloud backups ensure that all critical files are preserved without relying on manual updates. Additionally, having a clear disaster recovery plan allows your team to restore access quickly and minimise downtime. It doesn’t matter if you're using Google Drive, Dropbox or another platform to store your business documents; make sure backups are scheduled, encrypted and stored redundantly.
An efficient document management system is the key to long-term growth. By creating a system where each member of your team is empowered with the resources they need to succeed, you can speed up your growth by smoothing your internal processes. At the same time, you should also keep one eye on cybersecurity when creating your document management system to protect against online threats from bad actors. Here are the key take aways:
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