6 Best Practices For Document Management System

Documents are considered an integral part of any business. Organizational growth depends on the document management strategy of the business. Document management system best practices are becoming crucial as they enable companies in reducing costs, improving service, increasing productivity, and meet regulatory requirements.

1. Recognize the need for a document management system

   Managing data and information is a challenging task. Thus, documents being one of the essential components of any enterprise cannot be left on their own and need to be looked after and managed consistently. The organization has to be very specific for handling, maintaining, or managing documents. Choosing an efficient document management system starts with accurately assessing your organizational needs. Below are the features one should look for in an ideal document management system.

   • Document Scanning & Digitalization
   • Document Security and Audit Trail System
   • Document Search Capabilities
   • Version Control
   • Document Workflow and Digital Signing Capabilities
   • Document Backups and Restore
   • Document Sharing, Collaboration, and Integration

2. Reduce paper clutter in your office

   There are many businesses that are still using paper documents for applications, invoices and to retain different types of information. Managing this growing amount of paper documents efficiently needs an efficient document management system in your office. It requires the deliberate removal of paper from processes and digital transformation.

   Docsvault document management software system includes built-in document scanning software that converts your files from hardcopy format into useable electronic documents. It helps you capture valuable information, and save the documents in a central repository for easy retrieval later. With quicker and easier access to documents, your employees can increase their productivity and solve customer problems faster.

3. Organize Digital Cabinet and Folder Structure

   Filing cabinets have become synonymous with the workplace but staying in line with physical cabinet and folder structure has become a challenge to many organizations. In a physical filing system, cabinets take a lot of space and increase operational costs. Physical folders which are not labeled properly can be misplaced and are difficult to protect from any data leaks or damage due to natural disasters.

   The Docsvault document management software system offers a logical digital cabinet and folder structure to systematically organize electronic documents. Similar to your physical filing system the hierarchical tree consists of Cabinets containing Folders that contain Files. Creating Cabinet using Cabinet wizard helps you to systematically assign proper settings like auditing, available profiles, security, alerts etc. You can create various cabinets based on different clients or departments such as manufacturing, accounting, HR, operation, sales etc. Docsvault allows you to create unlimited Folder Templates for later one-click recreation. Folder Template enables you to predefine securities, document profiles, custom columns and audit trail settings for any folder within the Template. It helps you manage your documents for instant retrieval and a uniform storage policy. Organize your documents in digital cabinets ensuring document management best practices.

4. Make Sure That Your File Naming & Indexing is uniform

   Indexing is very much important to protect and easily search for documents of any business organization. Sometimes, employees name files the way they want which creates difficulty in searching for the file when needed. Without uniformity in naming and tagging, it is impossible for you to carry out document management best practices.

   Docsvault is an efficient document management software system that offers a Document Profiling & Tagging tool to help you improve the accessibility of your documents. It allows you to set custom index fields for documents for easy categorization and search. Profiling also adds valuable information to any document for a quick overview of the type of documents and its contents. To meet document management best practices, make index values mandatory. It will reduce human errors and you can easily maintain consistent document profiling.

5. Protect Your Documents from Possible Threats

   Often paper filing involves a lot of risks as it is easy to destroy, difficult to track versions of, and very difficult to preserve and protect. Even if you decide to go paperless, your files and folders can be easily exploited and deleted because of the lack of security on your file structure on your machine. Furthermore, the activities on your folder and files cannot be tracked, thus it is difficult to find out if someone has viewed or deleted any file. Security is the most important feature of document management system best practices.

   Docsvault’s Security Tool offers user and group-based access control along with various system-level rights, that allows you to easily share and control access levels to documents in your repository while keeping sensitive documents locked and secure. Docsvault’s Audit trail can help you track all the activities and tasks related to a document. You can query for events occurring between particular dates by specifying a date range, user and events such as created, viewed, deleted, exported, etc.

6. Go For Automation

   One of the greatest challenges to an efficient document management system is human error. And if you are dealing with huge amounts of documents, human errors are inevitable and can happen quite frequently. An automated document management system can help manage this with fewer errors and at faster speeds.

   Docsvault document management software system is capable of automating various tasks on documents. Through automating, businesses can manage documents gather records more effectively, and carry out document management best practices. Docsvault includes automation tools such as:

   • Workflow Automation
     Docsvault’s built-in document workflow management software helps an organization to design, execute, and automate various business processes where tasks are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules.
   • Email Automation
     Email Automation allows you to automatically capture emails from your company email servers, email servers hosted with ISPs and even from services like Gmail, Hotmail & Yahoo and store them in neatly organized folders. You have a choice to capture only desired emails and attachments based on simple rules.
   • Web eForm Automation
     Docsvault’s web eForms allows you to create web-based forms within your document management system to collect and process various information and to create dynamic documents. It transforms your outdated paper-centric forms process into an electronic and paperless process. You can easily design and create electronic forms in a span of a few minutes.
   • Digital Signature Automation
     Docsvault Digital Signature module allows you to digitally sign PDF documents within the Docsvault system on demand, route digitally signed documents in a workflow for multiple approval signatures, auto-sign documents as part of a workflow and verify the validity of all signatures in a digitally signed PDF. Docsvault’s Signature Requests enables you to get online signatures from anyone outside your organization, i.e. non-Docsvault user, without leaving Docsvault.

Implementing and properly using a document management system can work as a game-changer for your overall business efficiency. If you want to get the most from your system, these efficient document management best practices aren’t just options — they’re requirements.