Creating your own Document Management System

Setting up a document management system involves three steps:

• Creating a document management plan,
• Implementing the document management plan,
• And following through.

The first step, creating a document management plan, involves answering these four questions:

1. What are the rules for creating documents?

All businesses create a variety of documents such as invoices, payment reminder letters, sales brochures, email, balance sheets, spreadsheets, reports in the course of doing and keeping track of business. And to keep things organized, all businesses need to establish rules about creating documents. For instance,

-Are there in-house templates for some of your standard business documents, such as letters and invoices, and where are they located?

-Is there an in-house style guide that needs to be followed?

-Should new documents be dated and/or time-stamped?

-What procedures should be followed for sharing or reviewing documents?

For some small businesses, the only point about document creation that matters will be where the templates for various business documents are located and how to use them. But if document creation within your business involves different people collaborating on, then for reviewing or updating documents, you’ll need to spend some time deciding how these things should be done to ensure efficiency and consistency.

2. How will we store documents?

There are actually two aspects to this question. The first involves the physical aspects of storage. Even if your small business is storing documents in filing cabinets, there are costs associated with storage; not just the cost of the filing cabinets themselves, but the cost of time when you and/or your employees file documents or go to retrieve them. In fact, the largest cost associated with storage, for most small businesses, is probably the cost of the time wasted when people are looking for documents.

The second aspect of storing documents is organizational; how will documents be filed? The key to filing documents is to follow good file management practices.

As a corollary, you need to know how you will archive documents. You need to decide how you are going to handle files that are out of date.

3. How can retrieving documents be simplified?

This question is the heart of your document management system. A good filing practice can help to simplify the retrieval of documents. Further, if you will follow file naming conventions consistently then it will be much easier to find any document.

You can also create a File Locations List, which will remind you of where particular types of files go and where to find particular documents. In the list, you also need to include whether or not the file will be on your computer system or filed in a physical location such as a filing cabinet. For instance, suppose you are using photos in your business. An entry in your File Locations List might look like:

Photos – computer – drive E:/photos – file in appropriate subject folder- non-digital – filing cabinet 3 – Photos – alpha by subject

The complete list would be printed and posted both by all computer workstations and by/on the filing cabinets.

4. How can we make/keep our documents secure?

All businesses need to have security systems, such as alarm systems, installed – even home-based businesses. Businesses may also need or want to invest in other security devices, such as window bars/grills, security cameras and/or patrol services.

You can spend all the time you want creating multiple passwords and encrypting files in an attempt to protect your electronic files, but it doesn’t matter much if someone can just wander in and steal your computer and accompanying hard drive.

So you need to have all your filing cabinets lockable and they should be kept locked after business hours.

Other general security procedures for electronic documents involve backing up documents regularly and keeping document backups somewhere other than the same hard drive where the original documents are located. Off-site is best to guard against having your business data wiped out by natural disasters.

Small businesses with colleagues or employees sharing the same computer network may also want to restrict some user’s access so they can only use or see some of the network’s resources. Even if a user is allowed to access a resource, such as a software program, particular documents can be password protected. Contents of documents can also be encrypted, making them accessible only to those who have the required encryption key.

Once you have created your document management plan by answering the questions above, you are ready to implement it, making sure that all your staff know the details of your business’s document management system and are following appropriate procedures when creating, storing and retrieving documents.