All news
How Document Scanning Supports Your Not-for-Profit’s Mission
August 05, 2011
Your core mission isn’t completing, filing and retrieving documents and information. Yet your staff wastes time and money every day managing piles of paper.What’s more efficient? A document scanning and management system that uses e-forms and document management software to streamline your paperwork and free your people to carry out your mission.
The Pain of Paper
Searching for client files, accounts payable documents, membership forms and other critical documents is slow, inefficient and expensive. And what happens when more than one person needs the information from a document, files are removed but not returned, or someone requires document access from a remote location? The paper chase is on.
There’s another pain, too: space. Filing and storing important documents — or documents that might be needed in the future — consumes both human resources and square footage. Plus, with financial and government requirements to save many documents, some for years, physical paper can pile up quickly, taking up valuable space in offices or rented storage facilities.
Document Scanning & E-Forms: Save Time and Money
Most of the documents you handle every day don’t need to be paper documents at all. Instead, financial files, client files and personnel files can all be scanned and securely stored electronically, retrievable in seconds from any computer, available 24/7, and with no physical storage space needed.
E-forms transform applications, personnel review forms, client files and other documents into ready-to-use electronic data that can be collected, approved and routed automatically. E-form software integrates seamlessly with your business applications, automatically populating databases and spreadsheets. By eliminating the need for manual data entry, e-forms streamline your paperwork, free up your personnel, and reduce the incidence of data errors.
Benefits of Document Management
All forms and documents can be stored securely for as long as desired and made available 24/7 to authorized personnel.
Documents are never lost, “borrowed” or misfiled.
Companies can easily design and deploy e-forms, which can streamline document processing.
Scanned and indexed accounts payable documents can be integrated with most accounting systems.
Well-designed document management systems meet regulatory requirements, including HIPAA.
Auditors have secure access to documents they need quickly and easily, without disrupting staff, and audit trails provide a complete history of changes made to every document.
No capital expenditure or IT support is required.
A document scanning/management company can scan and index all existing files for fast, easy start-up.
Do More with Less
With budgets and human resources under more pressure than ever, paper files waste valuable time and money. Efficiency studies show that office workers spend up to 50% of their time looking for information, and an average of 18 minutes searching for a document. That translates into $14,000 worth of productivity lost per worker per year due to an employee’s inability to find the data required to do his job. Add to that remote workers, or operations or personnel that span multiple sites, and the inefficiency grows.
Document management with online retrieval shows donors and other stakeholders that a not-for-profit is operating smartly and efficiently. More importantly, these systems allow not-for-profits to deliver a higher quality of service to more clients with fewer resources.
Mitch Taube
