5 Business Document Management Errors and How to Avoid Them

It’s easy to overlook the importance of document management in business. Business owners consider finding information a vital part of the job, so they write off the time spent searching for the data part of the job. But when document issues account for 21% of productivity loss during the day, you can’t afford to have a poor document management system.

The good news is that many business document management errors are easy to avoid. Below are five common mistakes you’ll experience with documents.

1. No Backup Strategy

Even if you have an excellent document infrastructure, it won’t be worth much if an accident happens that causes you to lose data. Unfortunately, data loss is more common than you think. As a result, many businesses lose critical business data and have to start building again from scratch.

That makes a backup strategy essential for protecting business data. Regularly backup your important files to ensure you can easily restore lost files.

2. Poor Access Management

Many companies don’t put much thought into document access management. Everything gets stored in a central server that everyone can access. If an employee gets compromised by a hacker and exposes all your business documents to prying eyes, it’s a problem.

A great access management system will protect you from many common cyber threats. Your damage gets limited because your employees have limited access to business documents.

3. Poor Organization

It’s easy to focus on storing all your documents in one place and do nothing else. While this is a quick way to provide access to files, it’s a problem if people can’t quickly find what they need.

That’s where organization helps. Whether it’s a document search or database, provide a way for employees to search through company data to find the documents as quickly as possible.

4. No Digital Copy of Physical Files

Some companies have massive piles of physical documents. They store them all in cabinets instead of scanning them to the computer. Doing this is a mistake.

Not only is it easy to lose paper documents, but it’s also hard to search through. Scan your documents to your computer systems and use something like a dotnet PDF library to convert your scans to PDFs automatically.

5. Ignoring the Law

Depending on your industry, you may be subject to many laws concerning file security. Unfortunately, not every business knows about these laws and unknowingly violates the law.

While you may get away with this in most cases, this can cause a significant problem if something bad happens. You’ll need to explain why and how you lost information or exposed data to hackers. Your company can get in trouble in these cases.

Familiarize yourself with your legal requirements for document storage. Once you do, find help complying with those laws.

Don’t Fall Victim to Common Business Document Management Errors

With how important data is for businesses, you can’t afford to create a document management strategy that doesn’t work for your business. Luckily, many common business document management errors are easy to avoid. Keep them in mind when handling your business documents to ensure you have all situations taken care of.

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