3 reasons Managing Documents electronically helps compliance

There are several reasons why organisations should resort to managing documents electronically.

From the business point of view, the main reasons are to achieve savings in terms of costs and time, better productivity and increased efficiency. With more and more laws favoring transparency and better management of information, achieving legal compliance has become a major reason to use electronic document management.

In this blog post, we will look at 3 ways managing documents electronically helps you comply with the law.

1) Quickly and easily access documents

Document management system offers you the ability to organise your files systematically in a variety of ways. Depending upon which solution you choose, you can organize your documents into folders, by document types, assign tags, link related documents to one another, or even organise them project-wise or client-wise. Searching documents can be by using various criteria or simply by their text content – much as you would search using an Internet search engine. These capabilities help you find files faster when you need to provide information to anybody such as clients, customers or government agencies and therefore helps team be more productive.

2) Restrict access to documents

New business laws being passed concerning information security relates to access to sensitive customer data. Customers share personal information like their home address, date of birth, National Insurance number etc. through forms, letters and other documents. They place their trust in your hands and the government expects you to safeguard access to that information. Document management software enables you to choose who you want to share documents with and who you want to restrict documents from. You can assign various role based privileges to the users. Some solutions even offer the ability to encrypt documents. All this ensures that no unauthorized person can access documents and other records pertaining to your customers and other stakeholders. Certain employees therefore may not have access to all documents. They can manage their roles better and can focus exclusively on their tasks.

3) Maintain a log of user actions performed using the software program

Maintaining a log file is a key aspect along with the provision of security features in a good document management system.  It provides safeguards to your customers’ documents and also operates without bias towards or against your employees. If you were asked to show that a specific action was performed by a certain employee (e.g. modifying a document), what would you do? Managing documents electronically using a solution like DocuSoft lets you keep an audit trail of events performed by users. This way, you can provide the evidence when needed.