Document Digitisation: What it means, Why it’s important, and When you should do it

Way way back are the days when offices can’t escape having file racks and shelves to keep important documents. That benefited from safes a lot too, as it became the next option for documents too sensitive to have on an open file cabinet.

Every office has its cabinet. There could even be other rooms dedicated to keeping files when the file cabinets become all packed. How sustainable could that really be? Apparently, not much.

What happens next when all the file rooms are full? Opt for archival, or create another room, or destroy the information? There’s only so much you can keep physically, and that’s what brought the need for document digitisation.

What is Document Digitisation?

Simply put, digitisation is converting paper-based files into digital versions that can be accessed on computers or any other digital devices. Usually, the paper documents will be scanned or photographed, and stored in what’s usually called a Document Management System.

The goal here is always to transform information that a computer cannot process, also called unstructured data, to a structured one. It may be to just capture static documents, or to convert handwritten text into digital format. In other cases, it would be media files like audio in analog to digital format.

Document digitisation could be a really tedious process, especially if you have many pages to capture. That’s why most organisations prefer to hire document digitisation companies like MaxFiles to help make this happen.

Relying on modern scanners, cameras and our proprietary Document Management System, we make the journey from cabinet to the web pretty easy.

But then, if you haven’t considered ditching those cabinets for document digitisation, here are some reasons you may want to have a rethink.

Why document digitisation is important

Physical document storage has its limits. Even if your documents are still few, the need for backups, and again, there’s the fact that your space will soon expire, whether you’re going digital now or not.

Low Cost of Maintenance

If you do the maths of what it costs to put up those file racks, the cabinet, the safe, and the human security you have in place to protect all these, this will make a lot more sense.

That’s even for safety alone. There’s also the expensive time spent rummaging through these unstructured data, to find important documents when you need them. This is one of the ways digitisation can help.

After document capture, the next stage in document digitisation is indexing, which is like categorising the data, and giving them identifiers like names or numbers. That way, it’s easy to look for documents with a simple search, saving you hundreds of paid work hours and multiple human resources monthly.

And it’s all easy to make the transition into machine-readable data. In no time, you can have documents in image, editable document and PDF formats, using scanners with AI capabilities to extract needed data from the original documents.

Data on Cloud – Safe & Easy Accessible

One of the problems with paper documents is that they must be stored in one place, in the right order, which can take up a lot of space. In addition to that, there’s the risk of loss or destruction.

If you’re using MaxFiles, for example, the scanned documents are stored on the software’s cloud storage. That way, you can access valuable data from anywhere online, while the original data is available on your digital device.

So, with the safety capabilities a document management system can promise, you also get backups on the cloud, giving you a guarantee that your data is always available, no matter what.

And with accessibility, it’s only to search, from any location using any device to recover important documents.

When should you digitise those documents?

Basically, the need for digitisation is ever-present, and no time is too early.

The most important signal is if you notice a lot of expenses are already going into maintaining those physical documents. Say you’ve had to start getting additional cabinets, or even set up additional rooms to store files.

In any case, if you still rely heavily on printing papers before any communication is done within the organisation, you’re missing out on opportunities to improve efficiency, enhance collaboration, save costs, and improve accessibility to important documents.

And you don’t have to look far to get this done.

Our team at MaxFiles have helped 80+ companies digitise their documents, on both small and really large scales. Talk to our team here to find out more about our document digitisation solutions