The legacy of paper documents is not going to go away any time soon. The Paperless Office still hasn’t quite arrived. Some paper documents contain essential information. Others contain signatures that are the only proof that a legal agreement is signed and binding.
Paper documents are a problem. They do not fit with modern working practices. Professional document storage and scanning are the solution. They make paper documents a useful part of the modern, cloud-based, working from home office.
The business benefits of specialist document storage
There are many benefits to a business in using specialist off-site document storage:
- Enhanced security against improper access, for commercial confidentiality, and meeting GDPR requirements
- Enhanced security against fire and theft
- There is an audit trail of who access which documents on which date, to discourage and detect improper access
- Saving office space, and therefore costs. It may enable a company to downsize their offices
- Better business continuity and disaster recovery: documents are safe, and available, even if the businesses offices are unavailable
- Scan-on-demand means documents needed urgently can be on your desk within a few hours
- Purpose built systems for racking, and for recording where documents are stored, means it can be quicker and more efficient to retrieve documents from off-site storage, and that documents are very unlikely to get lost.
Document Scanning
The business benefits of specialist document scanning
Using a professional scanning bureau has many benefits:
- Reduces physical storage costs by replacing paper files with secure digital records
- Improves access to information, allowing documents to be retrieved instantly from any location
- Enhances productivity by removing time spent searching for and handling paper files
- Supports flexible and remote working with secure online document access
- Strengthens data security through controlled permissions, encryption, and audit trails
- Helps meet compliance and regulatory requirements with structured record management
- Minimises the risk of loss or damage from fire, flood, or misplacement
- Enables faster decision-making with immediate access to accurate information
- Frees up valuable office space for more productive business use
- Simplifies document sharing and collaboration across teams, departments, and locations
Scanning is easy with a good supplier
They make the scanning process as simple as possible. Simply put, they collect the documents and return the scans. It’s a simple four step process:
- they collect the documents from you, in their secure, tracked, branded trucks
- they prepare the documents perfectly, taking out folders, staples, and creases
- they scan the documents, making sure each scan is perfect, and use OCR to extract the text for indexing and searching
- they do whatever needs to be done with the documents after scanning: returned to you, securely stored for you, or shredded for you.
Finding all the needles in a haystack: OCR is the answer.
We hope your paper documents are all clearly and correctly filed, so that you can always find the one that you need. But what happens when you need to find documents based on their content, not their title? When you need to find documents using a different categorisation to your filing? For example, a court case might mean you need to access all documents relating to a specific area of expertise. Or a long-standing client issues a Subject Access Request, so you must find all documents relating to them. (A Subject Access Request is a right under data protection law that allows an individual to ask an organisation for confirmation of whether their personal data is being processed and to obtain a copy of that data.) You are left looking for an unknown number of needles in a very large haystack of paper.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the answer. It converts the scanned image into text that can be saved in any modern format, for example PDF. The key advantage is that the text can then be searched electronically for specific words or phrases. It’s like having your own private search engine, searching all your documents in the time it would take to get one or two paper documents out of the filing cabinet.
Anyone can store & scan, but specialists do it best
Scanning and storing documents isn’t hard. Anyone can do it, in small quantities, and at low quality. If you are a “Fred in the shed” one man band business, then using a second-hand filing cabinet for storage works fine, and using your printer or phone for scanning works fine. If you are a professional business, they don’t work well enough, and you need the specialists.
Specialist storage is purpose-built, secure and well organised. Nothing ever gets lost. Anything you need can be found quickly and reliably. They will deliver the right document back to you, first time, every time.
Specialist scanning is top quality, every time. There are no scans where the document is folded, or at an angle, or unreadably poor quality. Plus, top quality OCR makes every word in every document indexable and searchable.
Cheap storage is a false economy. The reputational damage of an important document taking a long time to be retrieved, being damaged or being lost far outweighs any short term savings.
Cheap scanning is a false economy. Poor quality scans mean vital documents are hard to read, or have parts missing. Poor quality OCR means searches fail to find those vital documents.