In our last Blog we discussed the use of scanners and how the latest models can make quick work of a paper mountain, but what is the best way to store these documents, share and access them securely?In our line of work, everything has to end up in a digital format. The key factors we looked at when going down this route were:1. Security:Make sure any system you are looking at encrypts documents in transit and in storage. Can you set up secure access for individuals limiting what they can see and what actions they can perform? If you have a team working on different clients, at different levels, then this is vital.2. Resilience:We love the Cloud, but you need to check the resilience of the systems. How many servers and different locations, how many backups are taken and how quickly can they be online?3. Ease of Use:Every software product has a million features, some of which are very useful, but many are irrelevant to your needs. See if there is a free trial available? Cloud systems don't need all the 'implementation' and upfront software costs, so it pays to try before you buy. Simplicity was key to our requirements and having an intuitive way of moving documents from A-B and accessing them quickly was very important.4. Customisable:If you are sharing documents with Clients, wouldn't it be good to add your brand to the screens? If the system you are looking at provides this, then it is generally very easy to set up.5. Integration with Email and Accounting Systems:Almost all of these document storage systems will provide simple email integration. If you have managed to convince your clients to go digital, then it's great when they email through a missing statement and you can automatically add it to their online folder. Even better if they can securely upload the file (to your system) themselves and you just receive notification.Most of the Online accounting systems like Xero and FreeAgent will allow you store documents with the relevant transactions and we are now seeing that OCR (optical character recognition) is becoming more important and can populate your system from a PDF. This is not a 'magic bullet' and from experience they don't always give you the results you were expecting (much faster, but not as clever as humans)!In summary, these systems can vary hugely in price from small monthly fees to substantial commitments. Security should be the primary feature, but after that, get a realistic list together that suits your firm. If possible, try before you buy...
