Missing paperwork can be expensive. Here’s how to make sure it never happens.

Has your business ever lost an essential piece of paperwork? If the answer is no, consider yourself lucky — because it happens to almost every business eventually. If the answer is yes, you know just how frustrating and costly it can be if you can’t find the right documents right when you need them. To make sure you always have access to important paperwork, first you need to understand why it can go missing in the first place:

Three reasons your paperwork isn’t where it’s supposed to be:

1. It gets lost in transit.

If you have paperwork that starts outside of the central office, or travels between offices, the odds of losing one or more crucial documents increase substantially. In fact, every time your paperwork moves there’s a greater chance it can end up in the wrong location — or, even worse, just disappear. Even if your business has well-defined processes in place for moving paperwork, mistakes happen.

2. It gets lost in the office shuffle.

Paperwork doesn’t have to make big moves — like transit — to get lost. Documents can vanish moving from one desk to another, or while they’re being shared with a coworker. They could even inadvertently get added to a stack of paper destined for the shredder. If it’s a physical piece of paper, and it’s getting shuffled around the office, there’s a chance it could be lost forever.

3. It gets lost right next to where it’s supposed to be.

Today, we’re all doing more with less. And that can lead to simple mistakes with devastating consequences. All it takes is one large invoice getting filed in the wrong place, and suddenly the income you thought was on its way actually isn’t.

Luckily, there are three steps you can take to end missing paperwork forever.

Step One: Avoid losing documents in transit by making sure they’re captured as soon as they’re created.

What does that mean? With today’s mobile capture solutions, you can make sure there’s a digital copy instantly. That way, if the original document goes missing, all you need to do is reprint it from the digital copy.

Step Two: Control the process, so nothing gets lost in the shuffle.

Step two is all about eliminating the shuffle of physical documents by putting a digital system in place to control precisely how documents are processed, shared and stored. You can even set up automatic alerts when sensitive documents are moved, copied, or shared, for an extra level of protection.

Step Three: Index documents so you can easily find them even if they’re filed incorrectly.

Even if you digitally capture physical documents the moment they’re created, there’s still a chance they can get mislabeled or poorly named — making them difficult to locate later. The solution is to make all your digital documents searchable by keywords like client names, service types, dates, and even invoice amounts. That way, if a digital document is accidentally filed in the wrong client’s folder on the server, searching for the right client’s name will still find the document.

What’s the best way to accomplish all three of these steps, and make sure your documents never go missing? Let DocLink — or any of our other DMS products — help you capture, organize, and find important documents quickly and easily. Contact MicroAccounting at 855.876.3773 to discuss how to take your business digital.