Do you feel like you’re still living a 20th-century life 19 years into the 21st century? You may even have hard copies of papers or lots of space devoted to files and filing cabinets taking away valuable space. Whether these documents are cluttering your home or business, you don’t have to be overwhelmed. Even if you don’t know much about how to digitize your documents, it’s not as difficult as you might think. At Storage Quarters, scanning documents is a big part of our business and we want to give you some tips.

Why Digitizing is Important

If you’re not sure why digitizing is important, consider how much it makes your personal and professional life easier. Consider that you’ll be able to compile your digitized documents in seconds rather than having to hunt through drawers in your filing cabinet. Instead of making endless copies of the document, passing it around the office, or transporting to other locations, employees can access them instantly. Digitizing your documents will open up a lot of physical space at your office, and you may be able to spend less on commercial space. You’ll also keep better track of your documents and make them more secure. Documents won’t get lost or stolen.

The How-To’s of Digitizing Documents

Many people use the saying “going paperless” when they talk about going digital. There’s nothing wrong with using the phrase, but you should understand that you’re not necessarily going truly paperless. You’ll still jot down notes or phone messages on your pad, but the important documents you need to keep control of will be scanned and digitized.

What to Do Before Digitizing Documents

The British tech website TechRadar has some suggestions before you start to digitize your documents. The first step you should take is to go through all of your paper documents. You may have mountains of paper in those filing cabinets, but once you actually look at them, you’d be surprised at what you don’t need to keep.

You shouldn’t just decide to keep or get rid of documents. You should also be thinking about how to categorize the documents. Putting each document on a single hard drive or cloud file is going to make it challenging to recover when you need them. Nor do you want to overdo how many categories you create. You need to create a system for categorizing documents. Make certain you don’t misspell a category and make sure they’re appropriately tagged. As lawyer Tom Flores told PC World, “The only thing worse than watching an attorney looking for a document in a banker’s box of paper is watching an attorney try to flip through documents on a tablet.” 

Let Storage Quarters Handle Your Digitizing

Once you know what documents need to be digitized and you’ve set up your categorization system, it’s time to let the document management at Storage Quarters take care of the rest. We’ll pick up your documents and we’ll even pack and organize your files if needed. We’ll transfer them to our facilities where your documents will be scanned and uploaded. We’ll use our indexing system or create one for you. Then, we’ll barcode each box of documents for you.

When Storage Quarters is done digitizing we can shred the hard copies of your documents or return them to you. If you run a medical office or handle documents related to healthcare, know that Storage Quarters always maintains HIPAA security standards. We can modernize your document storage and secure your files. Contact us today for more information.