While unrealistic to think that not a single sheet will be printed from a business printer again, the hybrid digital workflow is now within reach of most businesses. To make it a reality, start by asking yourself one question: “How can I make sure that every piece of paper that’s important to my business is also available online, right when it’s needed?”
Start With a Document Audit, Not a Scanner
First, identify and classify all physical records. Any active files (accessed in the last year) must be prioritized for scanning. Then, determine which inactive files need to be retained for compliance and can be moved to secure offsite storage. Finally, destroy any obsolete documents.
Once you know what’s being stored, you can start to develop your folder structure and file-naming rules. This isn’t something you want to leave until after scanning has started as it makes the process far less efficient. You end up having to reorganize your digital files later. Or worse, they become impossible to search, making the whole endeavor a wasted effort.
Prioritize What Actually Slows Your Team Down
Digitizing every document in your office might be an appealing ultimate goal, but in practice it’s all about getting the right data in digital form first. Starting with important, high-use files reduces your office’s dependence on paper and the costs that come with it. With an immediate upgrade in office efficiency, the electronic document business case grows easily.
Handling Legacy Records at Scale
Hybrid transitions often run aground at the backlog. 15 years of operation, for example, is roughly 180 months of potential paperwork. Even if only ten percent needs to be physically kept (employment contracts, licensing agreements, etc), that’s a massive volume of paperwork to get through to “go digital.” This is where professional scanning bureaus earn their place in a project plan. The Docshop handles bulk digitization and secure document destruction for businesses that need to move quickly without dedicating internal staff to a months-long scanning project. The value isn’t just speed, it’s chain-of-custody documentation, consistent scan quality, and the ability to hand off secure destruction of redundant files without creating a compliance risk.
Build the Security Layer Before You go Live
Physical records are protected by a basic security mechanism: keeping them in a locked room with a key. But when it comes to digital records, we need a different strategy which, if implemented correctly, offers much better security. For instance, multi-factor authentication for your cloud storage prevents the bad actor who stole the password from accessing the files. Access control ensures an accounts payable clerk can’t open HR records, and audit logs will record the time an attempt was made, something your filing cabinet can’t do.
Transport and storage encryption mechanisms take care of the second layer. The files are encrypted while they are sent over the internet and also when they are stored on the cloud. The best part is, these aren’t even complex configurations that need dedicated personnel to set up. Most enterprise cloud solutions have these features but they are often overlooked during the setup phase.
The other thing people ignore is the business continuity advantage. Physical records don’t survive floods or fires but digital ones stored in multiple clouds do.
The Day-Forward Rule Prevents Backsliding
Once you’ve been through the effort of digitizing your legacy archive, the hard part is over. Which is not to say the work is done. If you don’t couple that project with a plan for how to handle incoming documents, your workforce will quickly generate the same volume of paper you just spent a year and thousands of dollars converting to a digital format.
A day-forward scanning policy is just what it sounds like: every physical document that enters the office, whether that’s USPS mail, a stack of signed contracts inbound from a client, or delivery receipts for supplies from your vendor, gets scanned and filed the same day. The digital file is the prime record and the physical document is either destroyed or archived according to a document retention policy.