The Benefits of Document Conversion for Businesses
Document conversion is the process of converting a piece of printed paper into a visual image that can be reviewed by electronic means. If you’re company wants to go green, paperless, and get on the road to digital transformation, a good starting point is document scanning – scanning paper files out of the filing cabinet and into the world of automation.
Why undergo the disruption of scanning what you have already spent time and money producing, printing, and filing away? Isn’t the process of feeding your paper files into a scanner and indexing everything extremely labor-intensive? Not anymore, it isn’t.
There are document conversion solutions that remove the technical obstacles of your decision to join the business digital transformation age. The days of a tedious, labor-intensive scanning process have given way to automation. Scanning technology involves a coding, batching, and automatic filing system. Scan, file and secure all documents in a central location.
A document conversion solution is what you need to take the next step in overcoming the inertia of procrastination and the status quo. You can get out from under the inefficiencies and expense of paper document production, handling, and storage and reap the benefits of digitization.
Benefits of Document Conversion
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Document conversion provides a better return on your investment
The Law of Diminishing Returns says that once you have reached a level of efficiency in your paper file management, the result will ironically be a decline in effectiveness—or, in the case of document storage, absolutely no return on your investment.
Your files are in great shape because you spend hours in filing and careful storage practices. What return on investment does all that paper handling add to your bottom line? (Spoiler alert: there is none.)
Consider the following:
- A three-drawer filing cabinet can cost around $300. It will hold about 9,000 pages of documents and take up square footage of expensive office space.
- As your business accumulates more paper, and retention periods lengthen because of new regulations (HIPAA, personal privacy, etc.), you need more storage space. You also need to spend more money and take extra care as your file inventory grows.
- The PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that a company can spend about $25,000 to fill one file cabinet and over $2,000 a year to maintain that cabinet.
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Document conversion overcomes Murphy’s Law
Murphy’s Law, as applied to paper documents, says that the one file or document you need to clear up some important matter is the one you cannot find. If you cannot find the document, it is as if it never existed, and it can cost you.
One study by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that a lost document will cost a company an average of $122. The study also estimated that 7.5% of all company documents go missing permanently. A company that loses 750 documents out of an annual 10,000 will cost them about $91,500.
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Document conversion increases productivity
Scan and quickly retrieve your documents through automation, and eliminate the time and hassle in rifling through paper files. If your employees spend an average of 20 percent of their time searching for paper files, you are losing productivity. Automate the process to achieve a significant return on your investment.
For example, an employee receives a customer question about a past bill or invoice and a request for a copy upon finding the document. Track the time from the employee’s trip to the file cabinet, search for the file, and fax to the customer, and you are looking at about 20-30 minutes of the employee’s time.
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Document conversion makes a business more compliant
Automating document control and access protects confidentiality. User permissions, encryption, and backup safeguards make compliance auditors happy and your business safer.
Along with compliance, document conversion provides added security of disaster recovery when off-site backups are in place.
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Document conversion puts a business on the path towards the paperless office and digital transformation
Digital transformation requires more than automating your production. It is important to automate actual business processes. If your process includes manual preparation of an invoice and moving its associated paper backups through in- and out-baskets, your business process is not automated. Files physically moving in the system are also subject to misrouting or loss.
Digitization allows your business to take on an eco-friendly, paperless approach. This route is paved through electronic document workflows, built-in quality and timeliness checks that make the business more efficient.
Document conversion isn’t the only way for every business to improve its processes. It can, however, be a way to take the next step in making a business more agile, efficient, competitive, and secure.