By Leyah McFadden
It only takes a minute or two. You get up from your desk, walk a few steps to the filing cabinets, pull open the neatly labeled drawer, rifle through the folders until you find the right document, and you’re back at your desk in no time. Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t always go this smoothly, as documents are frequently filed in the wrong folders, taken by others, or even lost.
Let’s face it: More often than not, finding a single piece of paper among thousands takes more than a minute or two, no matter how well organized your filing system is. And all those extra minutes add up. You might have wasted a couple hours or more among the filing cabinets by the week’s end. Think of how much more productive you would be with all that extra time! With the help of our software, you can get those wasted hours back. Here’s how.
Don’t Bother Getting Up
When all of your files have been scanned and stored in a paperless storage system, you don’t have to get out of your seat to find a document. It’s right there on your computer. Without constantly getting up and interrupting your work, risking a chance with the office gossip, you’ll get a lot more done. You might have to stand up just to stretch once in a while, but that’s much more luxurious than hunching over a filing cabinet.
Don’t Search—Find!
To find a file with eFileCabinet’s paperless software, you can use a method similar to traditional filing, clicking on the Cabinet, Drawer, Folder, and then File that you need. It’s still much easier than digging for a physical paper file. But you also have the option of using eFileCabinet’s advanced search tool, which can look for your keywords not only in the name of your files, but also within the text of your documents. You can even create a customizable profile for any item you store, so you can search by client name, company, or any criteria you choose that will help you find files fast. It may be called a search, but really all you’ll be doing is finding.
Files Can Be Found
It’s bound to happen, even with electronic office file management: Someone will put the document you need in the wrong folder. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter anymore. Instead of pulling your hair out, spending precious time figuring out where on earth the file could have gone, you can just use our sophisticated search tool. Although only one user can check out a particular file from eFileCabinet at a time, which prevents multiple users from making changes to the file simultaneously, you can still access a preview of the file, which is often all that you need when you have an impatient customer on the phone.
Scan for the Win
During the transition to a paperless office, you will become good friends with your scanner as you upload your files to the document management system. But after that? You’ll never have to label a folder by hand ever again. eFileCabinet even allows you to create a template that can be mass-applied to folders or files so you don’t waste time creating a classification system. You’ll never have to print out a document just to physically store it in a file cabinet. You can upload any file—emails (including attachments), Word documents, Excel spreadsheet, QuickBooks files, and more—to eFileCabinet directly from your computer. And when a piece of paper dares to cross your desk, you and your friend, the scanner, will come away the conqueror.
Shred Is Dead
Anyone who has spent an entire day or more shredding old files at the end of a calendar year will tell you it’s no picnic. But when you have the best in paperless office solutions, those days are gone. And if you’re envisioning spending half a day deleting files on the computer instead, think again. eFileCabinet has a retention feature that allows you to choose how long you keep a particular folder or file. All you have to do is choose the date on which you would like it to be purged (or virtually shredded) or moved, and your shredding or archiving will happen automatically on that day, even if you are on a picnic.