Its a tedious task but record keeping is as essential to your small business as it is to a Fortune 500 company. The difference is your business has fewer people to wrangle those records. The digital age makes this task more manageable for your small or medium-sized company.
In a previous blog, I detailed the pitfalls of poor process documentation, “How Boring Process Documents Secure an Happy Ending.” Spotty business documentation results in worse nightmares than the loss of your business. No business wants the tax collectors knocking on their door or a lawsuit.
But, lousy record keeping is one of the leading causes of tax problems and legal hassles. All business dealings include contracts like leases, purchase orders, sales agreements and the like. It’s imperative to keep all original obligations in a place where the authorized employees can find them.
The new locked filing cabinet is a cloud where you can store all your essential business documents off-site but readily accessible on any device to an authorized employee. A Capterra search for Document Management software returned 161 possibilities for a small to medium business. How do you select the perfect one for your business?
Plot how your employees desire your documents to flow and be accessed, not how they flow today. Search for software applications which support that flow within your price range. Identify a few options, seek employee opinions on those options, and choose the option which can grow with your company.
A quick, cheap option won’t be a bargain if your employees hate it, and it can’t keep up with your document management needs after set up.
Author: Kris Keppeler, writer for Crossing Genres on Medium.com, and Does This Happen to You? on Channillo. Follow her @KrisKKAria on Twitter.
Small Business Solutions 