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Featured in Paperless Press - By Michael
Giardina
September 2005 – Document
management has become a very attractive tool for small
firms to improve
efficiency and profitability. Better-designed and less
expensive hardware has made the ideal scenario of one-touch
electronic access to your clients' files more affordable
than ever before. But will your fledgling document management
system integrate seamlessly into your practice, or will
it become yet another piece of software on a long list
of programs that help you run your practice, but are awkward
to use and don't play well with other applications?
Office Tools Pro is a full practice management suite.
its document management system is tightly integrated with
several other productivity tools, such as contact management,
scheduling, projects, time and billing. Its user interface
embodies a simple, intuitive design, and it costs a small
fraction of what other document management systems require.
Electronic documents, such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft
Excel files, are stored with your scanned documents, so
your staff can manage all company and client documents
from one centralized system.
There are two common reasons to install a document management
system. The first is to eliminate or reduce paper and storage
costs and, second, is to lower administrative costs and
increase profitability.
Office Tools Pro contains a number of workflow features for stored documents
that can help you manage your work. The Copy feature allows you to take an
existing file, make a copy of it and place that under a different client. The
Email feature allows you to email documents directly to a client. An average
customer service call can cost between $20 to $30 when you consider staff time,
overhead, and other costs.
Choosing the Right System
Before deciding on a document management system for your
office, make sure that it is a system that does not lock
you into some proprietary storage scheme. Does the proposed
system allow you to access your stored documents through
Windows Explorer, even if you are not in the document management
system? Office Tools Pro allows you to do this. Documents
can be automatically organized into folders by clients
name, project or category. |
