If you’re considering about going all digital with your business’ documents—stop just thinking about it and start planning the transition today. Not only does digitizing your office’s documents eliminate bulky paper storage, it actually saves you money.

By choosing the right document management software for your business, you’ll save time searching for the documents you need, meaning that you’ll have more time to get actual work done. Are you still not convinced? Let’s take a look at five key areas where document management software can transform your business.

1. Document management software creates a powerful database for your documents.Even if you have most of your files for your business in digital format, the standard search options on your computer are not really powerful. By adding keywords and tags to your documents, you can easily find the right document by searching by client, case, account number, and other metadata.

You’ll actually be able to search the full text within the document, too, so you won’t have to guess at titles when you’re actually in search of a single phrase or idea. All of this can add up to hours of reclaimed productivity.

2. It makes documents more secure. You can lock your paper records up in a file cabinet, but there’s no way to prove that no one is looking at them. Document management software can tell you exactly who accessed the document, when they accessed it, and why. Access rights can be determined on a number of levels, including groups, departments, and individual users.
3. You can automate your workflow with document storage software.You probably already have a system for dealing with documents as they come into your business. Now imagine if that entire process happened on its own. There would be no need to waste time a resources making sure that a document was properly labeled and all appropriate parties were notified of its arrival. You could set up automation whereby a document, based on its source, was automatically filed in the correct location and the correct users were notified of their access to it.
4. You can save money on storage. You can eliminate your offsite file storage location with document storage software. Even if you store all of your records onsite, you still need to pay for the space to keep them safe and dry. Get rid of the file storage room and give a deserving employee a fancy new office.
5. It will be worth the time you spend scanning. Some people might be discouraged from investing a lot of time into a plan to scan all of their paper documents, but there’s no reason to think that it’s wasted time. In fact, many document management systems use optical character recognition, a powerful tool that allows the software to “read” the text on the document. By teaching the software to organize the scans based on language in the document, you’ll save time on the whole digitizing process.