A business document is a critical component of every organization. After all, business documents can instill confidence within your organization, clients, potential investors by telling a story of your business’ origins, intent, and the journey you are taking to achieve your goals. 

This is why it is a must for businesses to use a to reduce storage space, enhance security, and improve regulatory compliance. Currently, the system market is registering a 13.07% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) with experts projecting it to grow to $10.17 billion by 2025. 

That being said, businesses should be more aware of the excellent features of to find a solution that will gradually eliminate the traditional and inefficient paper files. Outlined in this article are crucial software features to monitor when searching for a solution to improve your productivity levels when dealing with critical business files.

Cloud Accessibility and Compatibility 

As more organizations do business online, the need for cloud access becomes more apparent as employees and clients continue to seek transparency, centralized management, and less complexity in accessing documents. An intuitive document management solution with cloud capabilities provides you with increased usability since stored files can be easily accessed from anywhere in the world with an internet connection and a few clicks. 

Moreover, cloud-based access control also offers a high level of flexibility for a business and a real advantage over the competition since it can establish fair access models that can be adopted for a particular group. Other than that, one benefit of the that has cloud plugins is its ability to perform automatic updates and security patches to make sure that it addresses any potential vulnerabilities, and the system is updated regularly.

What’s more? Cloud compatibility also enables the simple implementation and integration of third-party and external services to extend the functionality of a platform even further. It also optimizes processes and allows for vertical or horizontal scaling to ensure that you adhere to needs and requirements specific to your operations.

Version Control

Version control is relatively common in the list of systems, features that need to be considered when searching for a document management platform and for a good reason. This is because version control is critical for digital documents, which undergo a myriad of revision and redrafting from multiple users. 

Through version control, a document management system can quickly and systematically maintain character level changes for all documents stored within, enabling for an all-encyclopedic rollback of all changes made, the author of those versions, and the retracement of all versions of the file. The best systems save every version of the document when it’s uploaded so you can go back to its history before vital changes are performed and keep what might otherwise be a useless file.

Other than that, version control also lessens the possibility of duplications and misleading through access to conflicting and multiple document versions. This is because the definitive versions of vital documents can be given a read-only to global leadership permissions to allow changes to be controlled.

Comprehensive Search Function

Searching for particular files can become increasingly difficult as your knowledge base becomes more packed with resources, which is why having a robust search engine may come in handy. Through a comprehensive search function, your workforce can accurately navigate your knowledge base to find essential documents, saving you and your staff a great deal of time in the long run.

Apart from that, a search plugin will also help you locate documents instantly while tracing hard-to-find files using several criteria. If you find yourself leveraging multiple search combinations more often such as indexing and scanning, you can easily save it for reuse in the future.

Furthermore, the search feature can provide a scalable document search and advanced search on all document attributes to make it easier to process essential data. On top of everything else, it can also make it more straightforward to link documents such as checks issued against a standard invoice or one check issued to pay off a plethora of invoices.

Customization

Every organization has specific requirements that need to be taken into consideration in the selection of a document management solution to ensure a smooth-sailing document management process. For that reason, an ideal document management solution should provide a particular level of customization, specifically the ability to generate custom fields or reports, define custom workflow, and add custom document attributes. 

Consider some document management software examples to find out the level of customization each provides so you can find a solution that suits well with your operations. It is, however, essential to have Windows and records customization, not to mention the ability to create custom dashboard reports. This way, you can monitor and measure key performance indicators on-the-go effectively. 

Customization also allows you to add your colors, logo, and brand image into each document to ensure that it stands out and leaves a memorable imprint to clients and potential investors.

Document Security

As organization’s growth is hindered by natural disasters and data breach data backup and security are becoming essential components of a reliable document management system. The ideal software should provide industry-grade document security such as encryption, role-based access, advanced access rights, user and roles, audit trails, revision indexing, SSL support, and ownership modification. 

This prevents unauthorized users from exporting documents out of the repository, meaning your sensitive information won’t go out of your organization. On the one hand, audit trails and activity email notifications assist administrators and managers in evaluating all actions performed on any files in the to ensure that sensitive documents are secured and away from prying eyes. 

Tags: , , ,