Document management is important. For many reasons. It’s also one of those things that is much easier to do as a regular part of your routines. Otherwise working with documents becomes a painful process that will almost always not get done.
Once you create a document management process it’s easy to maintain. All you have to do is save each file in the correct place. If you do that every time it’s not difficult to maintain. If you start saving all your files on the desktop with the hope of filing them later, it won’t happen. Files will get lost, work duplicated and every time you need to find something it will be frustrating.
Here are my 4 favorite reasons why you should care about document management.
It’s easier to find things when you need them
The best reason to care about document management is because it makes it easier to find documents when you need them. It also makes it less likely that you’ll end up with multiple copies of documents which is never a good thing. Surprisingly, good document management procedures also mean you’re less likely to keep documents you don’t need. Thereby saving space and making your computer, and your backup systems, a lot less cluttered.
You’ll have everything you need for compliance
Every business must abide by certain compliance regulations. There are taxation compliance issues, human resource compliance issues, privacy compliance issues, regulatory issues in most industries, and even general business regulatory compliance. You need to be sure you have all the documentation required for your compliance. And all these issues mean you need to be sure of where the documentation that proves your compliance is. Good document management procedures make it easy to know where your documents are. They also make it easier to edit them when changes are required.
It’s easier to know which version of a document is the most recent
At some point, we’ve all ended up with several versions of a document that different people have worked on. Often, at some point, we’ve edited a document that wasn’t the most recent copy. Then had to go back and edit the correct version later. Good document management procedures prevent this. Both by having naming conventions to ensure it’s easiest to see which version is the latest, and by having a control document which lists the most recent version and its location.
It’s easier to control who has access
When your documents are all filed correctly it’s easy to give someone access to a folder of documents that they need to access without giving them access to documents they shouldn’t be able to access. For example, documents with personal information about other staff members, or clients, shouldn’t be accessible to people that don’t need access. However, if your documents are all stored in one folder you either need to share them on a file by file basis or give access to the entire folder to people who don’t need that access.
If you’ve decided that you need to pay more attention to your document management, but don’t know where to start contact me and ask how I can help.
