5 Ways a Document Management Service Can Improve Your Business

Documents can be the bane of any businessman's existence. Documents are a fact of life in the business world. From advertisements to legal contracts to protocols, from business plans to presentations to spreadsheets, almost every person in a business has some contact with a document.

By Jordan McCollum

In most businesses, several people write, read and revise the same documents. This process can become inefficient and time consuming. But this hassle can be minimized or even eliminated with a document management service. Designed to allow easy collaboration and document review, a document management service can improve any business by reducing the amount of time misspent in document revision and eliminate confusing duplicate copies and edits of the same document. Below are the top 5 ways a document management service can improve your business.

5. Virtually no training downtime.

The best document management service works with the word processor, spreadsheet, database or other programs that you already use. By eliminating the need for extensive training sessions, a good document management service is ready for use very quickly so that your business can benefit from the service almost instantaneously.

Some document management services require no IT infrastructure, meaning that you don’t have to spend time and money installing a central server or LAN if you don’t already have one. A document management service that works with the software you already use can help your business manage documents within minutes instead of weeks or days spent learning new software.

4. Streamline document creation.

Is every document in your business written or created by only one person each? Most documents require several people in the process of document creation for each document generated. Most people working on documents work at their own computers. Gathering around a single computer or in a conference room to work on each document can be inconvenient, inefficient or even impossible in many businesses. Printing and manually editing documents wastes paper and is time consuming.

A document management service ensures that everyone who needs to be a part of the document creation process is included. Each person’s input, edits and revisions can be tracked conveniently and easily, streamlining the process of document creation.

3. Faster document review.

Your business may not have a legal team that confers over and reviews every document you create, but every established business has a method for reviewing internal and external documents and communications. Sometimes this revision process can be extremely time consuming and result in multiple edits and copies of the same document.

A document management service tracks all of the revisions to a document including who has edited the document, what changes have been made on each version of the document and how the different versions fit together. With a document management service, you can eliminate the confusion of multiple copies of each document and speed up the revision process.

2. Instantaneous collaboration.

If you were in charge of a document that required collaboration from your colleagues, how would you go about getting their input? After writing your initial draft, you might try a conference meeting or call to revise the document. You might consider dropping off a printed copy at each of your colleagues’ desks. You might try e-mailing the document to each of your colleagues.

While each of these methods may work, they can also take time and slow down your document process. Unless you meet with all your colleagues at once, you’re sure to end up with multiple copies of the same document with very different edits. A document management service is another approach that can make document collaboration fast and easy. You can still use your e-mail to distribute your document, but a document management service tracks all versions of your document including who edited what when. When the various revisions are returned to you, a document management service quickly and easily merges these documents into one perfected document. Collaboration couldn’t be easier than with a document management service.

1. Eliminate document chaos and increase uniformity.

Without a document management service, each version of a document creates more clutter and confusion. When you’re in charge of a document and you receive several people’s edits, how do you keep them straight? How do you store them? How do you enter all their feedback into one document to create a uniform, final copy?

With a document management service, you get a final edit of your documents quickly and easily. Rather than multiple copies of the same file in many locations, keep your organization simple and straightforward. Your documents will be more uniform and better quality—not to mention better organized—with a document management service.

A document management service can make it easier for you to manage not only your documents but your company. Instead of needlessly wasting time tracking documents through endless changes, a document management service creates uniformity and allows you to focus on your job. What are you waiting for? Improve your business’s documents and efficiency with a document management service today.

Jordan McCollum is a Content Writer for 10x Marketing, an Internet marketing firm. To learn more about how a document management service can improve your business, visit NextPage at http://www.nextpage.com today.