When it comes to document storage it can be said that it is almost a lost art. More and more offices are moving away from paper to paperless offices. This isn't a bad idea, but at the same time what do you do with all the documents that you already have stored on paper? They still represent part of your client's history with the company and you must keep hold of that data in order to maintain legal obligations to the client.
Some companies are spending lots of time, re-writing the documents into digital format while other companies are spending weeks, months and years scanning in the old data one page at a time. However, there is another way that you could get a complete electronic document storage system. If you search the internet you will come across a number of firms that offer heavy duty scanning facilities that allows you to make the switch in a short amount of time to a complete digitalised system.
How this basically works is that they take boxes of your old document storage away, these documents are then processed through the industrial sized scanner in minutes rather than hours or weeks. The resulting output is them inputted into an electronic database which is then accessible by the client.
It may sounds strange to pay a company to perform your document storage which in effect is a job that you could in purpose perform yourself. However, if you have every actually sat down and contemplated the process of copying all of your text placed documents on to a computer system then you will quickly come to understand the complexity behind it.
I have worked at companies before that actually tried to perform the job of becoming a paperless office themselves and it was a long, tiresome and pointless exercise which took a perfectly good individual away from their role and therefore heaped extra pressure on to the rest of the colleagues in the office.
Obviously in the current credit crisis it would be better to not spend too much money at all, but at the same time you have to justify the time of taking an individual or individuals out of their normal role and then making them inventory your entire back catalogue of documents.
If you need to get someone to archive all of your old documents the get online and search for 'document storage companies' and make the most of your time in the office in 2010.
Author Resource:
Dominic Donaldson is a business analyst with many years of experience in the financial industry. Find out more about document storage at http://www.ukdocumentstorage.com/Distributed by Content Crooner