Helping you with the Google Effect
Our memories aren’t what they were. When you can’t remember the name of that film, celebrity, or town in your favorite city, what do you do?
A document management system – to organize, index and control documents – for any business, is an absolute necessity. But solo practitioners and smaller firms somehow don’t see the need. They often cling to their well-thought-out directory structures, and believe any added functionality with document management programs is not worth the expense.
In a well-thought-out directory, all correspondence is stored under “correspondence”, right? Wait. Or is it “letters”? Or perhaps “memos” and “emails”? And when correspondence is saved by multiple people on multiple servers and local desktops, therein lies the problem.
Document management is a centralizing force. When all users are obliged to use the same system, you are assured that everyone uses the same conventions.
What if you could guarantee that all emails and scanned documents were stored in the same place? What if all documents were organized using the same system instead of having clients’ documents stored using different criteria – by user, by practice area, document type and more?
Avoiding of human error
The time lost in a manual system due to human error is substantial. A user may have stored a document in the wrong place by accident, forgotten its name, date created, or even ‘drag and dropped’ an entire directory to a mystical location, all in blissful ignorance.
In a manual system, the user must know where an existing document has been stored and what its name is. But as Google and other search engine usage has grown, our in-built memory capability has slackened. It’s known as the Google Effect. We off-load memories to the cloud just as readily as we would to a family member, friend or colleague.
Once users have (eventually) recalled their naming conventions, they’ll no doubt stumble searching for a document created by someone else. If the original author is out of the office it can be detrimental to small businesses with well-though-out folder structures. When people change jobs or assignments, the problem is aggravated. Searching, in each of these scenarios, certainly takes more than five seconds – the maximum it would take a management system to find what you’re looking for.
Security. Through central archives that can only be accessed by authorized staff, Zetadocs helps improve the security of your finance document records and reports.
Managing payments. Accounts teams can manage approval processes on screen, making it not only faster but easier to stay on top of overdue items in need of chasing or reassignment.
Searching. Zetadocs makes it quick and easy to find not just a single document such as an invoice, but all quotes, purchase orders, delivery documentation and correspondence relating to that invoice too.
Speed. This speeds up the search and inspection of any sales or purchase transaction by auditors, helping statutory audits run faster and more smoothly. Zetadocs automatically indexes and archives copies of all documents.
Peace of mind. The archive itself can be at a remote location and can be readily backed up to a secondary system, providing protection against fire and flood.
Zetadocs makes document management simple and searchable, whether you remember the naming convention, or not.