With our businesses going virtual, thanks to the worldwide push for remote work, the need for digitization has increased multifold. From remote collaboration software to online meeting solutions, technology has been playing a huge role in supporting virtual teams to carry out their work in a remote environment. A big part of our work environment is our paper files and documents.
Businesses create and manage huge amounts of documents every single day- training manuals, onboarding materials, checklists, blog posts, approval docs, proposals, sales decks, HR guidelines, press releases, and more.
However, in a virtual environment, it becomes impossible to share paper documents. And the more we create such documents for business, the more important it gets to have practices in place to manage these documents. That’s where a file management system comes in.
Also Check:Burndown Charts: What Are They and How to Create Them?
Why we need file management software and systems?
A file management system is a cloud-based service that facilitates the storage and managing (and sometimes creation) of all your documents and files from a single point of contact.
In other words, it’s a filing system that operates in the cloud where you can store all your documents and company files and retrieve them whenever you want from anywhere around the world.
Remote working has brutally exposed the old paper-based document storage models that businesses have been using for decades, leaving them in despair. Even when working in a physical office, paper documents bring more chaos to the table than calm.
The chances of error and misplacement along with supplementary costs of storing and maintaining file cabinets are a few of the major hurdles businesses tackle every day. Besides, they are difficult to locate and access becomes impossible if your peers are working remotely.
The challenges are bigger than you think. Take a look at these stats:
- A staggering 7.5% of all paper documents get lost.
- Document challenges account for 21.3% productivity loss.
- Companies with annual revenues between $500k and $1 million can save as much as $40k per year by switching to digital document management.
- On average, a professional spends 18 minutes searching for a document, which adds up to nearly 50% of their total time on the job.
- Around 20 percent of the business time – the equivalent of one day per working week – is wasted by employees searching for information to do their job efficiently.
File management system plays a significant role in making the management of files easier, faster, and more efficient.
The Many Advantages of a File Management System:
File management software and systems offer a lot of advantages when compared to physical files storage systems, some of which include:
- Simple storage, surveillance, and retrieval of documents irrespective of location
- Superior search abilities mean less time is spent on searching for important files
- Lowered storage costs associated with physical files.
- More security and privacy control over sensitive company data
- Disaster recovery and backups
- Real-time collaboration and improved teamwork
- The version history of each document to see when edits were made
- and much more!
Seeing that over 77% of business owners want to access files remotely, having a file management system in place seems like an obvious decision.
If you are looking for some of the best file management system out there, don’t worry, we have done the heavy lifting for you!