Electronic Document Management Solutions and News

Managing Your Business Process With a Reduction in Head Count

In these difficult times, many businesses are finding it necessary to reduce their workforce to adapt to a changing economy.  This can place a heavy burden on the employees that remain, requiring staff to do twice the work and resulting in a stressful work environment.  Luckily, there are Software-as-a-Service solutions that can lift some of the heavy load for a fraction of the cost of staff salaries.Software-as-a-Service (or SaaS, as it is often referred) is a model of software deployment whereby a provider delivers an application to customers for use as a service on demand. Oftentimes these applications are designed to automate a process that otherwise would require multiple employees to manage.

Early adopters of SaaS technologies realize several benefits when implementing these solutions, including:

• No long-term contracts.

• No upfront costs.

• No equipment to purchase; no software to install.

• Reduction in IT needs and managed servers.

• Monthly fee subscriptions.

• Data storage in secure hosting facilities.

• Guaranteed uptime.

• Login access to information via the Internet.

Document management is offered in a SaaS model by DocuVantage OnDemand® to help businesses efficiently capture, convert, distribute, store, and manage documents and data online. Using applications like DocuVantage OnDemand® allows organizations to also implement automated workflows that move documents through an electronic process based upon your business rules.

In addition to saving on staffing expenses, electronic document management allows your company to help the environment and save on printing, copying and mailing costs. With the constant demands placed on businesses trying to manage in a down economy, it's hard to find a reason not to consider a SaaS document management solution.

Featured Industry - Nonprofit
Three Common Mistakes Nonprofits Make in Document Management

Many nonprofits struggle to maintain their organization because they make some simple mistakes in managing their information. Here are some of the most common examples and solutions to keep your organization ahead of the rest:

Mistake No. 1: Recreating the Wheel 

With a high turnover rate and without an organized system in place to maintain information, nonprofits are forced to recreate the wheel for many of their fundraising events: their primary source of income. When documents, such as event agendas, press releases, event marketing collateral, programs, invitations, ticket designs, etc., are not tagged and maintained efficiently for future search and retrieval, they are lost and must be recreated.

This can cost the nonprofit an unnecessary increase in time spent planning an event. It can also result in additional vendor expenses, due to an inability to find recent vendor contracts that could have been used to negotiate.

By scanning or dropping the electronic files into an easy-to-use electronic document management system, you will no longer worry about losing this information again. With the automatic version control feature, you can find the most current version of the document by searching by keyword or other meta information, and ultimately, events will be launched faster and more efficiently.

Mistake No. 2: Missing Contract Renewals

There are two ways that missing a contract renewal date can be detrimental to a nonprofit:

1. By missing the renewal date, the nonprofit may lose access to a resource.
2. The contract auto-renews without giving the nonprofit a chance to renegotiate at a lower rate or cancel the contract all together.

Don't you wish the Excel spreadsheet that was located on the computer of the person who left last year, would have jumped onto your computer and told you the contract was expiring? Wishful thinking.

Implementing a document management application would allow the nonprofit to easily monitor contract renewals by setting alerts that will send a reminder when a contract is reaching its expiration date.

Mistake No. 3: Failure to Meet Compliance Requirements

In addition to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, nonprofits are required by the IRS to maintain documents, such as Form 1023 and Form 990, among other financial and operating documents, for a minimum period of time. It is also important that nonprofits be capable of proving they did not improperly dispose of documents "with the intent of obstructing an investigation."*

The best way to avoid being indicted for these crimes, or having to waste valuable time in producing the documentation in case of an audit, is to retain your documents in an electronic application that specializes in these governance best practices. Software-as-a-Service applications, like DocuVantage OnDemand®, can help you easily comply with these requirements.

*http://www.probonopartner.org/publications/Corporate%20Governance/http___www.lawhelp.org_documents_390901DC_554772-v5-Form_990_alert_-_doc_retentionc-lpedits.pdf

DocuVantage OnDemand Success Story: Deep Water West

Deep Water West Investments, a Winter Haven, Fla., real estate investment and property management firm, is a DocuVantage OnDemand® customer. With each tenant Deep Water West manages, there are several documents to retain associated with the tenant agreement. These include, but are not limited to, licenses, certificates and contracts. With nine properties under management, and 35 tenants per property on average, Deep Water West was challenged with retaining hundreds, if not thousands, of important documents. As the company grew, its paper-based document management system started to create time-consuming challenges for the business.

Kim Welch with Deep Water West shared this story:

"We had an issue where it was critical to locate a 6-year-old document associated with one of our leases. Had we not organized all our documents in the DocuVantage application just recently, it would have taken me hours to locate the information. But with all our files properly indexed and filed in DocuVantage, I used the search function and found what I needed right away."

With your information stored in DocuVantage OnDemand, you may search your text- or image-based documents based on content. Desktop word-processing documents, scanned documents that have been converted to text using optical character recognition, and other text-based files can all be quickly searched and compiled into a ranked list.

Deep Water West was initially investing in DocuVantage OnDemand to use it as a tool to manage the workflow of bill payments. "My goal was to load all our bills into the application to make it easier for my management team to access from anywhere they could get online," said Welch. "We wanted an automated online system that would help us ensure our bills were being paid on schedule."

For more information about how DocuVantage OnDemand can help you manage your business, visit us at www.docuvantage.com and sign up for a FREE trial.

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