Businesses today work with a huge amount of documentation, including employee files, invoices, and business records that require long-term storage. While the traditional way of keeping data was to store it physically on paper, with the increasing demand for digitalization, companies have started shifting towards the digital counterpart of keeping data intact. However, the combination of traditional hardcopy media and digital media can create complications, and this is where a document indexing service comes into play.
What exactly is a document indexing service?
Document indexing refers to a technique for classifying and archiving documents in order to retrieve them later using a logical system. To put it simply, you can scan and convert any hardcopy document into a digital image in a document imaging and indexing system.
Moreover, by detecting and categorising documents and using additional search parameters, indexing software improves text for search and produces an accurate result.
In the following ways, document management can get easier with indexing:
- When metadata is used correctly, each document can be grouped with others that are comparable based on the keywords provided.
- By making it simple to determine which document belongs to a given group, indexing streamlines your capacity to manage your documents.
- Also, it makes it simpler to group huge quantities of documents into defined categories than it would have previously been necessary to do by manually searching through each page.
With that being said, let’s look at the reasons why document indexing might be a good idea for your business.
1. A Time-Saving Solution
Manually retrieving documents and information can be a challenging issue, and it can take a lot of time to successfully complete the task. Moreover, this also hinders employee productivity as they need to put in requests and wait until the search is completed. On the other hand, document indexing can be done in seconds with an easy-to-use search bar for anyone to retrieve information.
2. More Storage With Easy Access
In a digital system, indexing documents only needs as much storage capacity as the storage media itself. Hard copy files that are stored can take days to access, which, as mentioned above, can be time-consuming. This is especially valid if your records are kept off-site.
On the other hand, thanks to digital document indexing, you can quickly find the file you need, making it a quicker and simpler option to retrieve old data.
3. Improves Safety
With information and data comes the importance of keeping them safe from unauthorised eyes from viewing any confidential business information. Physical documents themselves might raise a number of security issues. Fires, flooding, or even the humidity in the atmosphere can destroy them over time. Additionally, it may take days, weeks, or even months to find a document that an employee unintentionally misfiled.
Indexing can enable account-based privileges, limiting each employee's access to the data they need to carry out their job responsibilities.
Conclusion
Document indexing has proven to be a long-term solution to the issues of document storage, security, and accessibility, and any business can reap the benefits regardless of its size or sector through this system.
