There is no business in this world that operates without documents. Every office has policies, rules, contracts, emails, reports, and many other types of documents. However, not every business needs a document management system – some do just fine with document storage. Let’s look at the difference between storage and management, and what type of business needs document management.

Most businesses use document storage services

Most businesses have a method of organizing their documents, and most of these are document storage services. If you store your documents on a SharePoint server, Google Docs, Office 365, or any other similar solution, your business uses document storage as well. These solutions are excellent for storing documents. You can ensure that everything is backed up in the cloud, you can easily share the documents as needed, and multiple people can work on the same file at the same time without causing any conflicts.

However, these are simply storage solutions because they do not provide any features to manage the documents themselves. Most storage solutions will have a few document management tools built-in, but they are no match for a fully-fledged document management system.

Document management programs

Document management systems go beyond simple storage and instead allow businesses to easily manage their documents. There are a lot of requirements we have from our document storage, but we have no way of ensuring them. For instance, we don’t want anyone to access the confidential financial data of our clients or our own earnings. However, without a document management system, there is no easy way to keep such information safe. If it is being stored in a private server used by the whole organization, there is a risk that someone may access it. If people are emailing such confidential emails to each other there is always the risk that their email may get hacked sometime in the future, and the hackers will then have the confidential information.

Document management systems introduce protections and access controls to documents, allowing businesses to easily control who can access them and who cannot. Management can decide that only managers above a certain level should be privy to financial information of the company. HR can ensure that they can keep files which only HR people can see, so the private information of every employee is kept private. There are hundreds of use cases like this – document management systems allow businesses to ensure that only the right people are accessing documents.

That’s just the beginning – document management services also keep a record of everyone who accesses documents. Thus, if someone leaks a document or gains access to it, the act will be there in the records to be audited. This feature also helps in editing and collaboration – multiple people can collaborate to create a single document, and everyone’s contributions are noted separately.


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Document lifecycle management

Document management systems also help your business ensure that all the documents are being managed when it comes to their contents. This means that the document management system will note how old each document is and will notify you when a document nears its expiry. Every document that is created will eventually expire and these systems keep track of every document. If you create a set of rules and policies, the system will notify you every year that you should review the policy documents to see if they need updating. A lot can change in a year – the technology being used, the aims of the company, the culture of the office, and other changes, and these changes will new rules and policies.

Many document management systems are also based in the cloud. This has several advantages. One is that this makes important files accessible from anywhere. An employee can be at a client site helping an implementation and they will still have access to all the files they need. This also means that any device with internet support can use these systems.

If you want to see how a document management system can help your business, then you’ve come to the right place. The Predict360 Document Management System is based on the cloud and is very easy to setup and use. Get in touch with out team for a demo.