Why You Might Consider a Version Control System for Documents

As you seek out ways to improve your document management capabilities, you will inevitably come across version control systems. Such a system may be exactly what your business needs. Here are the reasons that you might want to consider a version control system for documents:

You want to know who did what to your documents

When a document gets changed, you should know who made the edits. This is especially important if the condition of a document affects your employees' performance ratings.

When you have a version control system, the person who made the changes is never in doubt. This is because the system will be able to show you when a specific person accessed a document and what changes they made to it.

You want to protect and preserve past iterations of documents

Having past iterations of a documents available will provide you with numerous benefits. This includes being able to immediately restore a document that was incorrectly changed, and the ability to use old data for reference, regardless of the current state of a document.

A version control system will help you do this by retaining old iterations of a document for restoration and reference. You will be able to access these older versions on demand.

You want to save digital space

You may want to reduce the number of bytes that your company uses. Redundant versions of a document waste a great deal of space, so getting rid of them would be a big boon.

Version control enables you to identify redundant versions so that you can delete them.

You want to reduce the issues caused by accidental document deletions

When a critical document is accidentally deleted, your entire workflow will be thrown off. In many cases, it will cause you to have to start an entire process over. This is a huge detriment to your company's productivity. In more extreme circumstances, an accidental deletion can damage a customer relationship or get you in trouble with the government. For example, an accidentally deleted tax document could make it impossible to provide the government with the proper paper trail during an audit.

With version control, the issues caused by accidental deletions will be erased. Your system will automatically preserve a copy of your document in the state that it was prior to deletion.

You want to streamline collaboration

Collaborating digitally can be difficult. When you have more than one person making changes to a document, communication about what has and needs to be done will become disjointed. 

With a version control system, your collaborators will be able to seamlessly work together. This is because everyone will be able to see how the document has been changed, and you will even be able to attach notes to each change that is made.

You want to have cross-version editing capabilities

If you have multiple versions of a document, you may discover a typo or other error. Correcting each version individually is time consuming and exposes your document versions to an increased likelihood of additional errors. 

A version control system will allow you to make a single edit that is distributed to all versions of your documents instantaneously.

You want to be able to tag versions for editing

If a document has multiple versions, then you will want to make sure that your team is handling the correct version.

A version control system will allow you to tag a document so that it is easily identifiable.

Gain control over your document versions