The most valuable asset that your company owns is its brand, because this determines whether or not people will believe in your organization's capabilities and product value to buy what you are selling – regardless of how good your products and services are. A key factor in developing your brand is your customers' personal experience with your company. There are many ways to improve the customer service experience (personnel training, faster service, etc.). However, one way to improve customer service that you may not have considered is with better records management.

Going paperless is a must for your office for two important reasons: you will save a lot of money and make your office run much more efficiently. In order to get the most out of a paper-free office space, you need to have a set of best practices in place to streamline the process. That being said, here are six paperless office best practices that you need to implement as soon as you have converted from paper to digital documents:

Your accounts receivable department is one of your most important assets and you should not take it for granted. Unlike cash, an accounts receivable account does not hold any guaranteed benefits for your company – at least until after it is paid in full. That being said, you can streamline the efficiency of your accounts receivable with the right process. Here is how to better manage your accounts receivable process:

Like any government entity, your municipal government generates countless records on a regular basis. These records can be hard to manage, as they can take up a great deal of space and make it difficult for you to handle future records and archives. However, the last thing that you want to do is destroy or ignore your current archives and records. They should be preserved. Here are the reasons why municipal governments should preserve all of their documentation, past, present and future:

Although many businesses, organizations and institutions have relied on microfilm to archive their media for historical purposes, it’s now more efficient and in some cases a requirement to convert microfilm over to digital media as the initial source for records management.  Microfilm conversion services can be a lengthy, technical and specialized process.  If you are seeking to hire a company to convert your microfilm, it’s important to know what questions to ask in order to receive quality microfilm conversion services.  

To ensure total patient safety, streamlined oversight and the highest quality of care, Canada's government has certain medical records retention requirements that you must follow. As with any government regulations, completely learning these requirements can be a convoluted process. To help your medical organization to get on track with the federal government's medical records retention requirements ASAP, we are going to break down what you need to know about them.

Relying on paper to store your documents has proven to be an inefficient, cumbersome and costly approach to document management. You can significantly mitigate all of these drawbacks by doing away with paper and focusing on using digital documents instead. That being said, the digital document management process is much different from dealing with paper files. In order to fully take advantage of the benefits of digital files, you need to understand this process. Fortunately, it is not difficult to implement once you understand what is involved. Here are the four steps that you need to streamline your digital document management process:

Managing documents is not at the top of an entrepreneur’s favourite activity list. Maintaining original records has long been a dilemma for companies of any size. In the past, businesses that generated a high number of transactions were inundated with paper in the form of invoices, receipts, reports, correspondence and tax returns. Papers were shuffled from desks, cash registers and retail counters into banks of filing cabinets and eventually into boxes in some sort of storage area. As time passed and the business grew, the problem of document storage and retrieval became more and more acute. Space that should be used to generate income became dead space. Revenues that could be reinvested were used to pay for more and more storage.

We are exposed to more types of data in a growing number of formats as information technology continues to advance. Despite this growth, we typically find it both easier and necessary to deal with more mundane forms of information transfer, primarily in the form of paper documents. To expedite the communication between the past and the present, and to bring the sharing of information up to speed, equipping your staff with portable document scanners is key. Below is an outline of some of the features and useful capabilities that you can expect when you choose a portable document scanner.

Technology has done so much to make it easier to manage and organize your business, but when it comes to files, things can get messy. Employees may save files to the wrong area, make multiple copies, or even delete copies. What you really need is to effectively implement reliable document management software. The key to getting your documentation in order is to find a solution that organizes your files in a manner that is easy to search, check out, store, and maintain configuration control.