Audits aren't on anyone's list of Top Ten Ways to Have a Great Time, but they are, unfortunately, a business reality.
Identifying and correcting the cause of any difficulty is the best way to meet it head-on. In the case of audits, the entire process of gathering the required documents far outpaces the fear of discovering a minor mistake. To begin addressing the issue, let's first identify the source of the problem.
Chasing down records.
The longer your company has been in business, the more documents you'll have to locate during an audit. Searching through 25 main-office filing cabinets and an off-site storage facility is enough work to bring your business to a grinding halt for weeks. In a paper-based system, pulling up historical documents requires massive amounts of time, and the additional printing needed for an audit can run into some serious money.
What if it's lost?
Audits are difficult enough when every document is eventually located, but what if your employees simply can not locate a required document? Even in highly-organized paper-based systems, documents go missing. Estimates based on research put the missing-and-never-located rate at nearly 7.5%, with another 3% temporarily misfiled. If the worst happens and a critical document falls into the lost-for-good category, the penalties could be devastating.
The Document Management Solution
A document management solution can eliminate the frustrations associated with paper-based document storage systems. Here's how:
- Document management makes pulling up records a simple process involving keyword searches. How's that for fast and easy?
- Document capture solutions store documents where they should be in the first place with Optical Character Recognition technology and intelligent indexing.
- Centralized document repositories put every document in the same location; no more lengthy searches through filing cabinets, banker's boxes, and dusty warehouses.
Is your company prepared for a compliance audit? Start getting there with Century's Document Management Solutions. Contact us today!
