4 Common Paperless Mistakes Business Make

By Matt Peterson, President & CEO of eFileCabinet

At this point most businesses are aware that making the shift to paperless is necessary, but many are going about it all wrong.  When not executed correctly, businesses are missing out on major productivity, efficiency and money saving benefits that come with paperless data management.

As someone who has been in the document management industry for over 10 years, the most common pitfalls I’ve seen are as follows:

Mislabeling or inconsistently labeling files.

When scanning in documents be sure to have a system of consistency in name them to make it easy to find them later.

Hoarding files.

Just like a physical file cabinet, when you overload your digital filing system with too many files, it becomes impossible to locate anything, especially those that are haphazardly labeled or indexed. Indexing files properly will help avoid sifting through massive lists of files.  eFileCabinet includes a “retention” feature that allows users to select how long they want to store particular files, so they are automatically removed once no longer needed.

Scanning documents with dead graphics.

A scanner is an essential tool for a paperless office, but it’s very important to buy one that has optical character recognition (OCR) functionality. Otherwise, you’re creating “dead graphics” that don’t have any text search ability.  With OCR, you can do Google-like searches for text within the document rather than just searching for the document name. eFileCabinet’s desktop and cloud-based storage solutions have OCR functionality.

Moving away from the office PC.

The world is becoming very mobile, and many business people are never truly off the clock- conducting business away from the offices outside of business hours.  It is important to have document management services that include cloud-based or mobile app offerings. That way, critical documents don’t end up stuck on a computer that you can’t access.

Matt Peterson is the CEO of Lehi, Utah based eFileCabinet, Inc. Founded in 2001, eFileCabinet, Inc. began as a cutting-edge tool to digitally store records in accounting firms. As it grew in popularity, eFileCabinet developed into a full-fledged electronic document management solution designed to help organizations capture, manage and protect their data.