Documents, reports, quotations, orders, invoices, reports, and so on. Whatever your business is, it is virtually impossible for your office not to be overrun with all kinds of paperwork. And beyond the large amount of paper, surely one of the most stressful activities is its recording and filing, a process that requires clear ideas and a strong (mental) organisation in order to be able to easily remember where the said paperwork is stored. Fortunately, it would seem that the future scenarios are quite different as a result of the document digitisation process that has started in recent years. A clarification: document digitization means digitally reviewing the entire process in which company information is processed and used, and not just the dematerialisation of the document in the strict sense. Digitisation therefore entails a change in the processes and procedures that have always underpinned the traditional paper document.

Let us try to understand this process even better by looking at the current regulatory framework. The latter makes it possible to dematerialise the vast majority of documents used in business. The complexity of the document digitisation process varies from business to business: it is limited when working on documents that are “natively” digital (Books, Accounting Records, Contracts); it is increasing when we consider analogue paper documents, containing handwritten signatures and stamps. It is therefore advisable to review the rules, processes and management models that have been adopted by your company to date. Nothing too complicated! Change is facilitated when you fully understand its value and opportunities.

It’s not just about having a tidier desk and fewer office walls covered in binders. With the digitisation of documents comes ‘direct’ economic benefits: less use of consumables and reduced costs associated with physical archives. It also reduces dispersion in the organisation, ensuring that a management task is not unstructured and misaligned with those chosen by colleagues: put simply, it saves time as access to the document is easier. It also increases management efficiency: for example, greater control over contact details improves dunning and debt collection, shortening the payment chain. In addition, only with digital management can you create a tracking system and statistics, which are essential for checking the efficiency of your document management system. By digitising documents and managing the data they contain, it is therefore possible to feed the company’s “Big Data Base” and open up the opportunity of analysing this data using artificial intelligence tools.

Sara Avanzi