Information is essential for the success of any business. The way we do business now, we rely on documents as a store of information. Documents are created, edited, shared, stored, and sought for, in any business on a daily basis. This is mostly done in paper format. Every business out there is constantly churning documents during the course of a regular day. Businesses spend a lot of time, money, and effort to manage the flow of these documents and it is not an easy task. Depending on the nature of your business and the volume of documents that it handles, adopting a document management system and moving to digital invoicing and storage will not just offer you significant advantages but ultimately will help you increase your revenue.
1.Save Money on Printing Costs
The Institute of Finance and Management (IOFM) reports, that the average business receives 63% of its invoices as paper. These organizations have to spend on buying papers and printing equipment. Not just that, they have to spend on postage to physically transport these to different locations as per their requirement. Moving to DMS will fulfill all of the previous invoicing functions that traditional paper processing did, at just a fraction of the cost and much too effectively.
2. Save Money on Storage Costs
Real estate is expensive and commercial real estate even more so. A standard filing cabinet with four drawers takes up 9 square feet of office space. According to Statista, the average cost of commercial real estate in Salt Lake City, Utah was $187 per SF in 2017.
If your organization dedicates only 100 SF to document storage, it is annually spending $18000 to just store paper.
Adopting a DMS to manage your documents would allow you to safely store 100 GB of documents for as low as $100 dollars per year. One hundred gigabytes is roughly equivalent to 65,000,000 Word documents.
3. Never lose a Document Again
According to global giant PWC,
- Organizations spend $20 in labor to file a document, $120 in labor to find a misfiled document and $220 in labor to reproduce a lost document.
- 7.5% of all documents get lost; 3% of the remainder get misfiled.
- Professionals spend 5 to 15% of their time reading information, and up to 50% of their time looking for it.
With DMS you never have to worry about misplacing another document again.
4. Ensure Compliance with Regulatory Laws
Keeping up with local, state, and federal compliance requirements such as Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA, FINRA is a complex and critical requirement for a business. Not doing so may result in fines, cancellation of licenses, and criminal liability suits. DMS makes compliance with strict privacy and security requirements easily manageable as they are designed to keep customer requirements and regulations in mind.
5. Eliminate Manual Processing Errors
According to research from Association for Image and Information Management (AIIM), the average cost to process a paper invoice stands at $12.90 with a median invoice processing cost of $7.90. Another startling fact is that even after incurring these huge costs, 68% of businesses experience errors on more than 1% of their total invoice volume. A document management system will help you significantly scale down these margin bleeding errors and the resulting losses.
6. Increase Productivity
The way the concept of work is evolving, work is no longer a location but rather an activity. According to a recent study by enterprise mobility company Good Technology, 80% of people continue to work after leaving the office.
24/7 access to your organisation’s documents empowers your employees to work on a flexible schedule in terms of time and location. This facilitates collaboration between teams and helps in increasing overall productivity.
7. Improve Cash flow visibility
Implementation of a digital document management system improves the time lag between the execution of processes and their documentation. This provides decision-makers with a range of metrics required for cash management, including on-time payment percentage, enterprise spends and trends, category spend and volume, spend-to-supplier ratios, supplier performance, accounts payable value and volumes, accounts payable process metrics, available early-payment discounts, percentage of early-payment discounts captured, and payments Metrics.