As more companies offer their staff either fully remote or hybrid working their HR, Finance and Quality departments have had to adapt the way they work to enable staff to access their documents from home.
5 reasons to scan your HR and other vital documents-
1. Remote/Hybrid (office & home) working
Businesses that offer staff remote, or hybrid, working have to ensure that all authorised staff can access documents that they need to fulfil their role and contribute to the ongoing productivity of the company they work for.
Utilising Cloud storage solutions scanned documents are available all day, every day, from both home and office locations and allow business teams to work together on the same documents. This is the best solution for both the business and staff member – a better work/life balance for the staff and a happier, more productive employee for the business.
2. Easy to find documents
Replicating existing filing systems and file structures makes finding documents much easier – no more scrabbling around in dark and dusty archive storerooms! Indexing (naming) the files by following protocols already known and understood by staff means the retrieval of vital documents becomes effortless. Mix this with the application of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to the scanned documents and vast databases of information can be interrogated for words or phrases wherever they appear in HR, Finance or Quality files reducing time spent searching and improving efficiency.
Documents that have been scanned and integrated into business systems play a major part in Digital Transformation in a business, increasing efficiency, reducing document processing time and of course costs.
3. Scanning improves document security
With changes to the world climate increasing dramatically the occurrence of fires and floods is an increasing threat to paper documents as neither fire or floods are good for them! Combine that with the ever-present threat of damage or theft it is important to reduce the risk of permanent loss of vital or irreplaceable data.
By scanning documents, the risks are greatly reduced as digital files can be backed up to external hard drives or encrypted cloud storage creating peace of mind and business continuity in the event of loss or damage.
4. Free up office space and reduce operating costs
Many businesses, post-COVID, are reducing their office footprints by introducing ‘hot desks’ for hybrid staff and this, along with remote working staff, results in companies needing less space. At the same time companies are significantly saving costs, reducing the space used for storing hard copy original documents by scanning their document archives.
5. GDPR retention policies
It is easier to achieve retention policies using documents that have been scanned rather than the paper files as varied document types can be both quickly found and the process of renewal or updating documents can be managed more effectively, saving time for the business teams accessing the documents.
At the time this blog was put together the press was full of large-scale data breaches of very sensitive personal data – huge issues for the organisations who were supposed to be protecting the data. Whilst some of the breaches were down to ‘human error’ the fundamental fact remains that personal and business critical data when held in a secure digital environment is much safer than a hard copy document archive often out of sight of scrutiny and more often not even secured. GDPR requirements are legion and getting them wrong can be a very costly experience.
For more information on GDPR go to https://www.gov.uk/data-protection
If your company is looking to get documents scanned we can help, see our scanning process.
We collect throughout the South West, South East and Midlands and can provide a no obligation (free) cost estimate for your project. Contact our team today!
