08 Jun Tips for Small Businesses to Digitise Paper Documents
With the advancement of technology, digitisation has taken over the world. Thanks to digitisation, companies across the globe can afford to have paperless offices and workplaces. But the process of turning an office piled up with papers to paperless is not a cake walk. But that tough path can be very easy if you use the right tool and technology.
Companies are using document capture software to digitise all papers and store them in an electronic medium for future use from any place at any time. It is helping them to follow the modern trend and making works efficient and productive.
What Are The Ways Of Digitising Paper?
First of all, you have to buy scanners or powerful camera based phones for scanning the documents. If it is a big office then you would need more than a single piece of device and hence, you have to buy in bulk. There are many apps that make your smartphone a perfect scanner and these days smartphone photos has more resolution than scanners.
Then you have to choose the storage space. You can use Google Drive and Dropbox for some time until the maximum limit is breached after which you have to buy the premium version. Additionally and most importantly, one has to buy advanced document capture systems to get the job done perfectly.
Make A Complete List – The first step is to list all the physical papers like bills, documents, files that are present and needs to transform into digital format. Once you have the complete list, it would be easy to track later on. You can also discard the useless ones easily.
Segregation – From the list, you have to segregate the papers into different categories having something in common so that you can set settings like that in the document capture software. When your documents are scanned and extracted, the software will automatically push the documents into different categories based on criteria provided. You can keep this list of segregation by manually spotting a file.
Storage – Now, you have to decide the destination where your files are going to reside. You can choose a central server. But the best technology is going to be cloud so that they never get lost due to system crashes or any mishap. You can scan and upload and read any document from anyplace.
Allocate Responsibility – It is not possible for a single person to scan all the documents and hence, you should allocate certain documents to certain individuals or teams to upload and digitise them according to enterprise content management using document capturing software.
Team Building Software – Team members have to take out printouts to pitch their idea and progress to team leader. Therefore, proper team building software like Evernote helps an employer to keep a track on everything and collaborate comfortably.
Finally, remove blank papers from your desk and try to do all the little things in life. Ask clients to do the same send all company related documents through emails. In a paper-intensive office, it would take a lot of time to digitise everything, but fruits of patience are always sweet.