You can cut company costs by storing all of your company’s important documents digitally through a process known as document imaging. Document imaging – a term commonly interchanged with document scanning – involves making digital copies of your documents and storing them on a hard drive or server.
Whether your company is large or small, it can benefit from document imaging. In a business world where printing costs are on the rise, digitizing important documents not only saves storage pace, but it helps protect your key files from disaster and provides additional accessibility that cannot be achieved using the hard copy form.
Here’s a closer look at the benefits of document scanning for businesses:
Less space. Think of the space you would free up in your office or company building if you removed all of those file cabinets full of documents. With the help of a professional document imaging service, you can easily make soft-copy backups of all your hard documents. After document scanning is complete, you can move those file cabinets into storage and shred the less important documents, thus freeing up office space.
Easy access. Another benefit of document scanning is the ability to collect all of your documents in one place – that is, on a hard drive, company server or in the cloud. This way, you can easily search, archive and retrieve your documents from a computer. Think of document scanning as a way of streamlining your document retrieval procedure.
More secure and recoverable. Document imaging also allows you to better protect your documents from theft. Rather than keeping sensitive records physically accessible (in case of a break-in), you can protect them digitally using firewalls, encryption and other computer security measures. Even more importantly, by backing up your documents digitally, you can protect them from fire, flood and other disasters. Whereas physical documents may be destroyed or require an extensive recovery process for retrieval, digital files can be easily retrieved from secure storage, allowing quick disaster recovery.
One overriding goal of all document preservation is maintaining document integrity. That is, document scanning should be a complete, thorough and careful process. These images will be replacing your hard copies; therefore, you need to ensure they are complete replicas of the original whole documents, without missing pages. Having digital copies will in the long run preserve your documents better than hard copies, so you should strive for the best scans possible. Because this level of document scanning requires skill and industry know-how, it’s recommended that you contact a professional scanning and imaging service for help.
