Go Digital: 6 Reasons to Digitize Paper Docs

In today’s digital world, information that is on paper is not user-friendly. Large volumes of paper take up valuable space, are expensive to maintain, can be mishandled, and eventually be misplaced and get damaged due to water or fire-related accidents. Keeping these things in mind, a lot of organizations are digitizing their documents to reduce costs, improve security and make their businesses more environmentally-friendly. 

First, let’s look at Digitizing documents :

Document Digitization: 

Document digitization is a process that transforms information on paper into digital information. For example, original historical paper-based information is only accessible to the people who visit it physically but when it is digitized, people from all remote locations can access the data securely.

In this article, we are going to discuss the key reasons why you should digitize your documents-

1) Document Storage Security: 

Document digitization services provide you with improved security for your sensitive documents. It enables you to store all your digitized documents in an online document management system and you can also set the security access permission on a user-role basis. Users from different locations can easily access digitized documents, thus ensuring flexible and secure access. Alongside, secure access, document digitization also benefits you with-

• Electronic audit trail with complete user access history
• Smart back-ups
• The selection of local storage or cloud storage

2) Improved Productivity: 

According to the Gartner report, employees waste almost 30% of their working hours on searching and managing documents. The traditional document management process is a time-consuming and laborious affair as it involves manual steps such as receiving document request, searching and retrieving the documents manually, and delivering it to the requester(s).

A document digitizing service makes your document organized, searchable, remotely accessible and makes the whole document management process digitized. Document digitization can directly give a substantial boost to your organizational productivity. 

3) Improved Office Space Management: 

Document digitization eliminates the need of storing your paper documents, thus you can remove most of your cabinets from your office space. You can use the freed-up office space for other important purposes like accommodating more computers printers and many other crucial things. 

4) Enhanced Customer Experience: 

As we have already discussed that searching and accessing paper documents are a time-consuming affair as it takes 15 minutes on average to do so. When it comes to accessing any specific document, customers hardly have time and patience to afford that waiting duration. The longer the response time, the poorer the customer experience is. Digitized documents are searchable and instantly accessible, thus substantially reducing the response time to your customers. 

5) Encourages Cost-Saving: 

Document storing and maintenance is an expensive affair. For example, a four-drawer cabinet may occupy up to 9 square feet of your office space and costs your organization almost $1000 yearly to maintain (employee time maintaining files and other paper documents).

There are costs for misfiled and lost documents. You may have to pay up to $120 for searching a misfiled document and if it is not found then you may have to pay up to $200 to recreate the same document. In the US, on average, employees consume almost 10,000 sheets of paper annually and there are additional costs for tonners, transportation, etc. You can do a considerable amount of cost savings by adapting digital documentation. 

6) Regulatory Compliance: 

Maintaining your crucial paper-based documents that comply with government regulations is an expensive and daunting job. Document digitizing services enable organizations to comply with the government regulations like HIPPA, Paperwork Reduction Act, etc. 

How do you Digitize Documents?

ARC enables you to work at the speed of digital by transforming all your information on paper into digital information that you can search and access from anywhere anytime. ARC leverages the advanced OCR technology to capture all the text on your document and converts it into searchable information with keywords. 

If your organization has multiple cabinets full of paper documents, you can either buy your scanner and educate your employees to do the scanning or you can take the help of a professional Document Scanning Company like ARC. Click here to know more about our document scanning service’s cost.