Document Management

If your business transactions are paper-based, managing and compiling the records of the transactions can be extremely voluminous and cumbersome. Document Management practice ensures that paper-based transaction records electronically which serves many benefits to businesses.

Document Management is facilitated by a set of computer programs to store electronic documents or images of paper data. As an example, let us consider that you have the invoices that you send to your vendors are in a paper format. You can convert them to an electronic format by scanning the paper invoice to an image format and storing them on your computer system. The document management system will store the images electronically.

What are the features of a document management system?

A document management system is central to the practice of document management. Ideally, a document management system must provide the following features:

  • It allows the user to retrieve records. This can be done by employing metadata (date, time, tags, document type etc). This facilitates the user to access any record which has been stored in the system.

  • It allows user to secure records. When a record is stored in paper format, it could be susceptible to a lot of physical and natural disturbances. Your paper records could easily be damaged if your office has a fire or if flash floods destroy your office. You would need to store paper records in highly secured places as paper records can easily be stolen.

  • It allows user to retain records. Now, a user can retain records which could be as old as 2 years or possibly even more. Storing paper records which have elapsed a duration of 2 years would need sufficient maintenance of the records. You could eliminate all this headache by employing a document management system which will retain the paper records in an electronic form off a central server.

  • It allows users to control the workflow. In a business, there are a certain set of documents which would need to pass through certain tables to get it approved and signed. A document management system alleviates this need by moving the files electronically. The administrator of the document management system will set rules for the workflow which will enable faster communication of the files or the paper records.

Document Management is a way by which a user has an option of managing paper records electronically. It eliminates the need for the user to maintain paper records. As paper records have their limitations in terms of maintenance and security, document management as a practice takes care of this efficiently.

It is extremely important for the user to ensure that the document management system's features are strong enough to support the volumes of the documents.