Here's How You Can Easily Implement Digital Archiving

What is possible digitally, is implemented digitally. Especially when it comes to document archiving, digitization provides tremendous support. No paper collecting dust in physical archives, no numerous folders, no more searching for space for all the documents. Thanks to digital archiving, retention periods are suddenly no longer a problem and employees have more time for other tasks. Both of these end up giving companies a plus on their account at the end of the day.

The key is the right software. We introduce you to 10 of them, which you can review more closely on OMR Reviews. In addition, we explain what digital archiving entails, what benefits it brings and what requirements must be met for compliant archiving.

Table of contents

1. What is digital archiving?

2. What are the advantages of digital archiving?

3. What requirements does digital document archiving have?

4. What prerequisites does digital archiving have to meet?

5. These 10 document management softwares are suitable for digital archiving

What is digital archiving?

The exact definition of digital archiving refers to the electronic storage of documents. This can be the huge volume of documents in offices, the personnel files of employees and all internal papers within a company. To implement digital archiving, you need Document Management Software (DMS). These can run in the cloud or locally. Further down you will find ten document management software and more on OMR Reviews.

This is what digital archiving can look like in document management software.

But digital archiving does not only mean archiving documents that were created and edited digitally anyway, but also those documents that are initially available in paper form. Integrating and archiving them can be a lot of work. However, it is even more time-consuming not to jump on the digital train. After all, employees spend a large part of their working time creating, checking, forwarding and filing papers, not to mention searching for documents in a physical file archive. Digital archiving addresses these time wasters. Once a document is filed, it can be found within seconds thanks to the search function.

What are the advantages of digital archiving?

In addition to the time aspect, digital archiving brings other advantages to light:

• Sustainability: We live in times when we have to be more or less meticulous about the CO2 footprint we leave behind. Bringing masses of paper into circulation increases this footprint in terms of deforestation. Especially in large companies, this is a challenge that still needs to be mastered. Digital archiving solves this problem and brings a lot of efficiency with it.
• Technologically neutral: Your company does not need any specific IT infrastructure or specific technologies to implement digital archiving. It's really simple: Computer/Laptop/mobile device + Document Management Software = digital archiving!
• Compliance with laws: Document Management Tools help you comply with guidelines such as the Principles of Proper Accounting (GoB), GoBS and GDPdU. In paper form, the requirement for employees is to have these principles in mind to be able to consider them.
• Inviolable Documents: While physical documents could be changed - if one had such intentions - digitally archived documents are untouchable for changes. This brings audit security into play: After all, companies may only archive documents in this way.

The advantages of digital archiving are versatile!

What requirements does the digital archiving of documents have?

Of course, digital archiving does not just have something to do with an electronic filing. As we have already teased in the advantages and the definition: digital archiving also includes legal and functional requirements such as an extensive search function or the observance of the GoB.

1. First, the requirements for digital archiving are geared towards the employees who do the archiving. According to this, the staff must be trained to comply with all legal principles and company-internal guidelines. Although Document Management Tools support this, it is advisable to inform specifically. Only then as a boss you can sleep peacefully, because the topic of audit security is safe in the true sense of the word.
2. To prevent chaos in the digital paperwork, automated archiving processes help.The requirement that no document is lost is met by treating every document equally. While physical document management can lead to different people applying different archiving methods.
3. As soon as the word audit is mentioned, many business owners quickly turn pale.However, if you make sure that both the archiving is conducted in accordance with the regulations and that external auditors have easy access, the color remains in the face.
4. Another requirement is to record every single step in digital archiving.To work in a revision-proof way, every change to the digital documents should be documented.
5. With so many data running through a suitable tool afterwards, security naturally plays a double and triple role. Thus, further requirements are geared towards the Document Management Software, which must ensure to cover all security aspects. This includes in particular the protection of personal data - keyword: GDPR!

What prerequisites does digital archiving have to meet?

In general, there are 0.0 prerequisites for digital archiving. It does not require any specific technology or IT infrastructure. You just need one software and suitable end devices for the personnel and yourselves. In addition, an onboarding for the respective tool is useful at most. You can use Document Management Software as well as Enterprise Content Management Tools. Ideally, the tools can also create an interface to other software, which either are already in use or will be.

These 10 document management software are suitable for digital archiving

And that brings us to the topic: Finding the right software! There are numerous tools on the market with which you can archive digitally. But Document Management Software, which meets the above mentioned requirements, presents a clearer result. We provide you with 10 sample samples that you can look at more closely on OMR Reviews. There you will also find the opinion of other users to the respective tools, so you can get a better picture.

• CAYA Document Cloud
• Filestage
• CloudConvert
• Enaio by Optimal Systems
• Zoho Docs
• ecoDMS
• amagno
• Adobe Document Cloud
• Docuware
• Templafy

Extra Tool Tip: With an OCR software - OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition - you can have scanned documents output as text documents. The advantage of this is, for example, that you can now search your digitized and archived files for specific information and continue to work with them.

On OMR Reviews you will also find OCR providers like natif.aior fintract.io.