Document Management Software and compliance go hand in hand, with automated workflows enabling employees to easily follow company policies. The time spent on manual tasks is reduced and advanced reporting features mean issues can be caught before they become a problem. Document Management Software improves your chances of passing yearly audits by keeping a tighter control on your processes.
With more staff working remotely there's a higher chance documents are being emailed back and forth, or using a collaboration tool that's not secure. With this in mind, how can employees be sure they are viewing and working from the latest document version?
When implementing Document Management Software, choose a system that shows who last edited a document and when. Access to earlier versions can be limited and each new version of a document can be named and recorded, making audits easier and reducing costly errors.
With sales tenders, multiple versions, revisions and mark ups can happen before the final proposal is submitted. Keeping track of all the changes can be difficult, but with a document management workflow, mark ups are kept and authorised users can go back and see the revisions.
Relying on paper, Excel or unstructured electronic files to manage compliance can lead to mistakes. Even with the best will in the world, having numerous employees retyping information and cross referencing multiple documents is risky.
If your process involves printing, manually stamping or emailing tasks, this can all be replaced with digital automation.
Cloud platforms offer state of the art document encryption and protection against cookie hijacking and downgrade attacks. Ensuring advanced security and disaster recovery will be important in any compliance strategy.
If everyone in your organisation has access to open and then edit documents, problems can arise and costly mistakes could happen. With Document Management Software access is given to authorised users, with a comprehensive rights structure ensuring employees can only access what they've been given permission to. Restrictions can be placed on what can be edited, retrieved and modified and by who from a digital filing cabinet.
Different document types have different retention rules and managing this manually can be overly time consuming. Invoices need to be kept for six years whereas CVs six months, which not only involves a lot of organisation to keep on top of, but also a lot of physical storage space.
Document Management Software manages retention and automatic deletion of documents at a time stipulated by the organisation when storing the document. An email notification will be sent to an employee before anything is deleted as an extra precaution. Keeping documents for longer than is legally required is non-compliant and puts an organisation at risk. This level of automation ensures compliance with GDRP, Sarbanes-Oxley and many other regulations.
Compliance audits ensure business processes are being followed in line with company policy. Organisations of all types and sizes can have both internal and external audits taking place. With the digital storage of indexed documents, information is easily accessible during an audit. Reports can be produced by document management software that confirm the organisations operating procedures are being carried out.
