Document management for Strata Corporations is a whole different ball of wax. If you’ve just been appointed as the President of your Strata Corporation, there’s a lot you’ll need to catch up on regarding document management.
One of the first things that you probably noticed when you started fulfilling your roles was how much paperwork gets strewn thorough the office. Since Strata is a non-profit organization, you don’t have a lot of office space or a large budget to spend on activities like shuffling paper. Finding alternatives is essential for minimizing unneeded expenses and maximizing efficiency.
What other options do you have to get organized and more efficient?
Taking your Strata Corporation paperless is a great way to reduce costs, get organized, and efficiently communicate with your homeowners. This can be done in 5 easy steps.
Step 1: Find a Document Management System (DMS)
Although you may be tempted to manage your documents electronically on your own, there are several reasons to consider budgeting in the cost of a DMS solution. First, a DMS will give you tools that will make the transition and upkeep of a paperless office seamless and smooth. A few of these tools include multiple methods to save and store your data.
Additionally, organizational tools and search tools are a necessity to any document management system. These saving, storage, and searching tools will save your Strata or Bareland Strata hours of time previously spent just managing documents. Since you are likely a volunteer, this will be a huge benefit for you. If you are paid or pay outside advisers, this will save the Strata money.
Step 2: Purchase or Rent a Quality Scanner
Buying a scanner does not need to be prohibitively expensive. A quality scanner such as the Epson 520 will allow for processing single or dual-sided scans, color, gray scale, and black-and-white documents. The Epson 520 comes with a TWAIN driver and allows for multiple document sizes. The Fijitsu 7160 scanners scans 60 pages a second and holds 80 pages at a time.
All these features will cost you only about $320, while a comparative scanner such as a Fujitsu will cost you around $1,000. Contact us by filling out the form for more information about the differences between these scanners. You can have a versatile and fast scanner that fits your needs for a few hundred dollars.
Step 3: Locate a Secure Portal to Communicate with Your Homeowners
As a Strata owner, you will have rules, communications, and newsletters to send to your residents. If you are spending your time and money to mail or hand-deliver those items, it can be a major drain on valuable resources, the most important of which is often time. To overcome these issues, you’ll need document management for Strata Corporations solutions.
Paperless document management comes with the added benefit of making sharing information securely and quickly very easy through web portals. Web portals allows you to have private and secure sharing with your residents, enabling you to share individual violation notices, inquiries, and other related notifications.
Web portals also allows for public sharing such as a folder that contains the bylaws, regulations, and other news information for the Strata. When each resident signs into the portal they can see their own private documents, but also have access to the public documents. Sharing documents is as easy as a few mouse clicks and just as fast!
Step 4: Upload and Organize Your Documents
Your document management for Strata Corporations software has the potential to become more organized and logically structured than ever before. To do this, first sort unorganized piles into common categories.
Second, take a small amount of time to locate the common documents in your files and create a common naming convention for them. If you are going to organize specific documents under specific folder names, then use templates to set up and apply structure en masse to your files.
This will make the organization in your cabinet uniform and enable saving and retrieving information to take place automatically. The next step is to start scanning (note: if you are bringing in large amounts of documents, please talk to us about easy ways to make your office paperless without needing to spend massive amounts of time).
Third, locate electronic documents and bring them into the appropriate cabinet alongside your recently scanned documents.
Step 5: Maintain Incoming Documents
Even if you take your Strata paperless, fully enjoying the benefits of a paperless office will require you to continue to maintain that paperless environment. Through DMS integrations to the other programs you use, you can avoid printing (and subsequent scanning).
The ability to directly send documents to your electronic filing cabinet is one of the features that makes staying paperless so easy! QuickBooks and Microsoft integrations are some of the best time-saving features and are usually considered must-have tools. Without this, maintaining document management for Strata Corporations standards will be difficult.
Step 6: Use Cloud-Based Document Management for Strata Corporations
If you are using a Cloud-based DMS, then enjoy the ability to access your strata documents from any location that has internet or data coverage and from any device or computer.
eFileCabinet brings all of the best time, space, and money-saving features you could want in a DMS in one convenient location. eFileCabinet offers desktop and Cloud-based versions, integrated client portal, mobile apps, automatic backups, and more!
eFileCabinet products are focused around helping our customers save time, space, and money by reducing the resources spent on managing paper. Fill out the form on this page to learn more about how document management by eFileCabinet can work for your business. [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]