5 Questions to Ready Your Business for Remote Document Access

The COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting stay-at-home orders has put the need to access company documents while working remotely front and center for employers; and this need will not disappear as restrictions are eased. Companies – big and small – have elected to let employees continue to work from home for the remainder of the year and beyond. With predictions of a second wave of coronavirus infections later this year, employees’ general hesitation to return to work for fear of the virus, lack of childcare issues, and, let’s face it, the comfort of working from home, businesses must be prepared to accommodate teleworking options.

While there are wide ranging tools and technologies allowing the remote sharing of company documents (e.g., DropBox, SharePoint, GoogleDrive), the starting point is getting these documents into a shareable format via scanning. Before your eyes glaze over from the weight of that task, know that not every company document needs to be digitized. This is a good time to wade through your office’s paper documentation and decide what needs to be scanned and what can be purged. It will save your company money in terms of the cost of scanning and storage space.

To aid you in this process, we’ve laid out a series of questions and options that will help guide you in your quest to digitize and get you the most accurate turnaround times and pricing from vendors:

1. What types of documents are to be scanned and what are the actual quantities of each?
   Letter or legal-sized paper
   Large format prints
   Other specified media
2. What is the state of the documents to be scanned?
   Single-sided documents
   Double-sided documents
   Mixed single-sided and double-sided documents
3. How are the original documents bound?
   Unbound documents
   Documents bound by staples, paper clips, in file folder or otherwise assembled
4. Do you want the documents returned?
   If no, do you want the documents stored or disposed?
   If yes, how do you want originally bound documents returned?
   Re-bound as originally received
   No need to re-bound
5. How will scanned documents be accessed?
   Searchable using optical character recognition (OCR)
   Indexed by designated information (name, title, or other)
   Not at all – just for storage only

Scanning single-sided unbound documents is a straightforward process and therefore is faster and is less costly. As complexities are added, the time and expense of a project necessarily increase. Understanding the details of and goals for your document scanning project will help your qualified vendors (1) provide you the best document management strategy and, as a result, (2) the best price. The remote workplace is the new normal. Are you ready?

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How can TDEC help you prepare for remote document access? Contact us for more information.