Maintaining compliance is a necessary function within your business. No matter what industry you are in, it’s important to know when to keep a document, how long to keep it, and when to dispose of it. When you’re dealing with paper documents, however, keeping track of certain dates and documents can be nearly impossible.
Added to this, documents that fall under the category of requiring compliance usually contain private information. How secure are your files when they are being stored in a few filing cabinets throughout the office, or in an off-site warehouse? How do you know who is looking through them? Worse, if an employee were to take the document from storage or from a filing cabinet to do work, it’s entirely possible that the document will get lost in a pile on a desk, or accidently thrown away. When that file is needed next for a lawsuit, or an audit, it won’t be there. If your business is seen as unreliable and disorganized, you may face bad publicity and loss of clients or partners, or you may even be facing a lawsuit.
Every one of these problems can be eliminated with InStream’s advanced data capture and document management solutions. Because documents are scanned electronically and both typed and handwritten information is extracted, they are entirely safe from physical danger like fires and floods, and they are also safe from internal and external data breaches due to the multiple levels of user permissions. At the same time, with these user permissions, these files can be accessed at any location with internet service, getting rid of the need to dig through the files and to take out the only copy of a vital record or invoice. This way, all important documents can be kept in one secure location, and any one document can be accessed by multiple people at one time.
While it’s important to know how long to keep a document, it’s equally important to know when to dispose of a document. Hanging on to a document for too long can open up your business to lawsuits, and you can run the risk of violating someone’s privacy by keeping a record. There is a balance to the process, and this balance can be reached in the easiest and most efficient way by using InStream to implement a program that can automatically detect when it’s time to dispose of a document. This way, there is no need to remember thousands of different dates of disposal or retention, and a document will never be left by the wayside again.
Maintaining compliance doesn’t need to be difficult. With InStream, each and every step of the process is completed automatically, giving you the time to focus on the important things.
Contact InStream today.
