Physical files have many shortcomings. For example, paper files attract bugs. They are also susceptible to water damage, fire damage, and decaying over time. Moreover, you have to find a place to store your documents. If you store them in your home or in your office, it might not be as big of a consideration. However, some businesses have warehouse or storage space rented specifically for storing physical documents.
Physical space to store documents does not come cheap. Storage space can be an expense that cuts into your profit margins and makes your business less successful. If, for example, you are renting storage space from another company, you are giving away your business’ profit to another business. More than that, what do you do if that storage company decides to close down? You would have to find a way to move your documents.
What options would you have for moving your documents? You could hire movers that would cost your business even more money. You would have to pay these movers to load their trucks with your documents and drive them to another storage space. This means you would also be without access to your files during the duration of the move. You could always enlist your current employees to help you move the files, but then you would likely have to pay them overtime. Overtime is a serious profit killer.
Searching Physical Files
Physical files are oftentimes organized in very classic ways such as alphabetical or chronologically. This is the way it has been done for probably hundreds of years. However, it can be very labour intensive to search through physical files. You have to sift through the actual physical files and hope that whoever filed them long ago placed them in the proper order. Because of human error, the file you’re looking for might be in the wrong place and you’ll never be able to find it.
Another concern is the amount of effort required to actually search through the files. What if you are searching for a name or phone number in one specific file. You have to read through every document that might contain the information you’re looking for. This could be incredibly time consuming and inefficient.
What Is The Solution?
You should consider digitizing your files using a service such as the Paper Escape document scanning service. These services scan your paper files and render them into digital formats such as PDF, DOCX, and others. That way you can upload the files to your computer and search them the way you would search any other digital documents. Also, these services often intdex the documents with metadata. Metadata is a category of information such as date, time, author, and file size. Metadata makes documents easily searchable. This way, you will not spend unnecessary amount of time trying to find the document you’re looking for.
Also, these documents are compatible with being uploaded to an internet cloud so that you can always have access to the documents. Since they will exist on the internet, you are not in danger of them being destroyed using any physical means.