Electronic Document Archiving: What It Is and How to Start in Your Company

Electronic archiving means storing your company's documents in an organized digital form, so you can find any document in seconds and know when each one expires, without digging through cabinets and paper files.

What are the benefits?

• Time: search by a number or a word instead of flipping through files.
• Security: a backup protects your documents from loss and damage.
• Deadlines: alerts before licenses, contracts and residence permits expire, so you avoid fines.
• Order: every document is linked to its owner, whether that's the company, a branch or an employee.

Steps to get started

1. Start with the important documents

Commercial registration, licenses, leases and employee documents. These are the ones you need most often, and they have expiry dates.

2. Scan them clearly

Use a scanner, or a phone camera in good lighting. A clear image means the text inside it can be read more accurately.

3. Categorize them and link them to their owners

Every document has a type, a date and an owner. An employee's file, for example, brings together their ID, contract and certificates.

4. Record expiry dates

This is the most important step. Once the dates are recorded, the software does the remembering for you.

5. Turn on backups

An electronic archive without a backup is a risk. Make backups automatic, and keep a copy off the device.

Searching inside images

The best archiving software reads the text inside images and scanned files, so you can search for an account number or a contract number and land directly on the page that contains it, not just the document.

The bottom line

Don't put off archiving until an important document goes missing. Start this week with the documents that have expiry dates, and test a program's trial version on your real documents.