If you view poor document management as merely an administrative inconvenience, think again. If left unchecked, mismanaged documents can quickly erode your business’ efficiency and security, ultimately harming your bottom line.
If you’re keeping the status quo by relying on traditional document workflows (e.g., paper), you’re exposing your organization to regulatory risks and data losses in the long run. Recent research suggests that businesses need to adopt a forward-thinking approach to document management and data handling, or they will continue to struggle with data quality issues.
Here’s what key stats say:
Company Performance Drops Due to Data Quality Issues, According to 91% of Data Professionals
The Great Expectations State of Data Quality Report was based on interviews with 500 data professionals across the U.S., with additional insights from a GX Slack community survey. Here’s what the report revealed:
- 91% of data practitioners agreed that data quality issues negatively affected their organizations’ performance and operations. However, only 23% said that their company prioritized data quality. This disconnect is what silently hurts most businesses. As companies continue to rely on inaccurate data, this results in poor business decisions, loss of trust in internal reporting systems, and problems meeting legal or regulatory requirements.
- Half of the respondents mentioned that their companies were only planning to set up data quality processes, while some had no plans at all. When companies lack clear standards and processes for checking data quality, errors can fly under the radar, affecting business objectives. Here’s the impact poor data quality can have:
- Money, time, and resources are wasted as teams spend hours analyzing subpar data.
- Unreliable data leads to poor decisions that keep your company from discovering opportunities to improve its products.
- Working with broken data affects team morale, sanity, and focus, as teams are constantly scrambling for workarounds or fixing issues. This may distract them from pressing matters such as product innovation or customer management.
48% of Employees Say Finding Documents at Critical Periods Is a Challenge
Imagine your team receives an urgent request from the city council for safety inspection reports and contracts. A task that should take 10 minutes consumes the entire day. Team members spend hours rifling through old filing cabinets, email inboxes, and disorganized folders to locate the needed documents.
According to a 2023 Adobe Acrobat Survey, this chaotic and manual handling of key documents is a reality for 48% of employees. Not just that—47% of respondents state that their company’s online filing system is “not easy” and “ineffective.”
Companies often fail to recognize the enormous hidden costs associated with these paper-hunting efforts, such as wasted team hours and loss in productivity, morale, and profitability. Holding on to outdated systems means dealing with the following:
- Broken and un-synced file storage conventions
- Hundreds of inaccurately named and tagged documents
- Systems that fail to communicate across departments
While companies claim to run annual “clean-ups,” this is not adequate; rather, it preserves traditional inefficient workflows. Instead, companies need a modern approach that includes smart enterprise search capabilities and systems that sync in real-time. Digitized workflows that collect and sync data securely and quickly ensure that:
- Teams have access to the latest information during critical times.
- Chances of duplicate data are low, leading to fewer delays in document searches.
- Diverse teams can collaborate easily and extract crucial documents through a centralized system.
45% of SMBs Use Obsolete Paper Records
A survey by Act! revealed that 45% of small and midsize businesses (SMBs) still use paper records for critical customer and vendor data assets. Of these, 11% manage paper-based documents without a formal process or system. As a result, SMBs struggle with team productivity and company performance, especially as they scale.
Here’s what lies in store for such businesses:
Record-keeping Difficulties: Paper records are more likely to contain inaccuracies and errors because of human error. Your team can easily lose, damage, or misread handwritten notes. Tracking a paper trail or verifying records is time-consuming or, worse, not an option at vital periods.
Errors in paper records may go unnoticed until a project is far too along in its implementation, causing compliance or regulatory issues. Lastly, storing paper records incurs substantial costs that cut into your profits. In comparison, a digitized process offers fail-safe elements, including error-checking and version control, as well as easy backups.
Loss of real-time customer and product data: Having customer and product data on hand—a reality possible with digitized data—means having access to customer behavior insights at any time. This includes everything from customers’ previous purchases to product preferences.
Paper-based records make it hard to capture behavioral information, which means you end up treating repeat customers as first-time clients. Therefore, you are potentially losing out on sales due to missing insights and poor customer service.
Wasted Time While Managing Inventory: Using paper forms for stock-keeping is like playing a guessing game. From delays caused by stock shortages to dealing with expired products due to overstocking, paper-based inventories distract you from more meaningful tasks, such as customer service and operational efficiency. Instead, digitized processes allow real-time access to inventory data, minimizing the risk of stockouts or overordering.
Want to Close More Deals? E-Signatures Can Boost Close Rates By Over 28%
Hand-signing documents is a thing of the past—a fact your clients and customers are well aware of. If you’re still expecting them to go through the process of printing, signing, scanning, and emailing crucial documents, you’re fast losing credibility—along with time and profits.
This is especially true when multiple documents need to be signed. If you want faster approvals, more conversions, and less friction in customer relationships, e-signatures are the way forward. A study by PandaDoc found that using e-signatures increased close rates by more than 28%, a major win for all stakeholders. Here’s why it is the need of the hour:
- Get approvals from multiple stakeholders across different locations in half the time.
- Personalize e-sign documents for more efficiency—whether by adding payment buttons, pre-filled information, dynamic fields, or auto-reminders.
- Get tamper-proof documents with built-in security features.
- Maintain signed records for audits to help avoid disputes and compliance issues.
With the digital signature market estimated to reach $70,247 million by 2030, e-signatures are right on-trend. Most importantly, their use sends a strong signal to clients and customers that your business is modern, efficient, and easy to work with.
It’s Not Too Late to Build a Smarter Document Workflow
If you spot any of the above inefficiencies in your business operations, don’t worry—it’s not too late to change. Follow these steps for smart and strategic document management:
- Pull the pen-and-paper approach out of data workflows; replace it with smart apps that capture data intelligently.
- Make the switch to e-signatures for quicker approvals.
- Prioritize data quality and version control among teams.
- Save time on document recovery by adopting seamless systems that talk to each other.
Alpha Software make it easy for SMBs with non-technical teams to go paperless without writing a single line of code. We'll digitize your forms, help you collect data intelligently, and build scalable workflows for your organization. Start today.
Further Reading: The Hidden Costs of Paper Forms
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