4 Solid Use Cases For Document Scanning

Document scanning can help you turn a large body of information into an easily accessible set of digital files. If you're not sure whether you have an appropriate use case, here are four that may help you to understand the potential of scanning.

Regulatory Compliance

One of the simplest cases for document scanning is to make regulatory compliance easier. Rather than trying to read information from existing documents and enter it into a database, a document scanning service provider may be able to convert everything quickly using their equipment. Not only does this save a lot of time, but it's usually cost-effective compared to the drawn-out process of manual entry.

Before you go this route, though, it's a good idea to ask the regulatory agency if scanned documents are acceptable. Generally, agencies are happy to have the documents on file in an accessible format. However, you may still need to keep the originals in case of regulatory actions or questions.

Storage

Many organizations retain documents for a variety of archival reasons. However, the current storage spaces for those documents can become prohibitive. Even if you have retention requirements such as those from the previous section, there's still value in scanning documents.

You may be able to pay for a low-cost storage solution that allows you to keep the physical documents in a more efficient and climate-controlled space. This will free up room while maintaining the physical archive. Also, you can cross-reference the digital copies with the physical ones for easy retrieval.

Notably, a company without retention rules for the originals may be able to destroy them after creating digital versions. This can free up space and reduce storage costs.

Legal Discovery

Law firms have an increasingly popular case for document scanning. Especially with aggressive document dumps, where other parties try to flood a firm with more documents than they can humanly read, scanning is a difference-maker. Once you've converted the discovery documents to digital files, you'll be able to do text and pattern searches quickly. Particularly for small practices with minimal resources, this may allow them to tackle bigger and tougher cases.

Sharing

A lot of documents are just very cool to share with others. Maybe a small town's historical society has discovered a trove of papers from a hundred years ago. Even if these are hand-written documents, modern character-recognition techniques are excellent at detecting text. You can then share genealogies, letters, and other forms of historical information that were once hard for folks to access. 

For more information, contact a document scanning company.