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Finance and accounting teams deal with a massive volume of documents each day. They could be invoices that need to be approved; budgets that must be archived; or proposals that need to be reviewed. Regardless, these documents must be effectively managed. That’s where document management comes in.

We’ve put together an eBook that compiles infographics, white papers, and more that describe how finance teams can effectively manage their key documents. You can download the free eBook here. Let’s take a look at some of the key sections of the paper.

Create and Manage Documents with Your Team

Developing a proposal or budget is a collaborative activity. That means that finance, accounting, the controller’s office, and the CFO may be involved in the creation of these documents. How do you manage the numerous versions, revisions, comments, and more?

Document management is about the effective creation, organization, and discovery of business documents. In this series of blog posts and videos, I’ll take a look at different functions within KnowledgeTree and how they can help you manage documents and boost productivity for related business processes.

Let’s start at the beginning of document management: adding documents to your online vault. KnowledgeTree gives you many ways to add documents. In this initial video, we’ll take a look at two basic ways: dragging and dropping documents into your browser and standard uploading.

What makes this especially interesting, though, is how you can use these tools to organize your documents. When you’re dealing with thousands or tens of thousands of documents, it is imperative that you and your team can quickly find the documents they need. Our tools for adding documents are tightly connected with KnowledgeTree tools for organizing documents.

Let’s see how that plays out when using our standard processes for adding documents. In this scenario, we have a corporate counsel team within a major manufacturer. The two document upload tools we’ll see in this demonstration are “drag and drop” using an HTML5 compliant browser, and our standard upload tool.

It’s no secret that today’s businesses generate a massive amount of documents in a variety of formats. Small and medium-sized businesses and corporate departments deal with an unprecedented quantity of documents that must be stored, retrieved, and shared across teams or across the enterprise.

Anyone who has ever worked in an office knows the frustration of managing and organizing documents with colleagues. Without a centralized repository, documents are usually stored on individual computers and emailed around on request. Worse, when an individual leaves the company, his or her store of knowledge and documents often leaves too. Documents are also subject to loss from hard drive failure if regular backups are not performed.

How to Get Document Management Buy-In

So, you know the value of document management. But how do you get started? What are the best practices to get team members on board for a document management solution?

Let’s take a look at how CanPrev, a Canadian company that specializes in natural health products, gets a produtvity boost from KnowledgeTree. The company, founded in 2005 by Tanya Salituo, a 3-time cancer survivor, performs rigorous tests to ensure the safety of their products.

Boosting Productivity and Compliance with Document Management

Each test and production plan must be carefully catalogued, stored, and ready for retrieval instantly. Doing so ensures that should government regulators require additional information, they can provide it without delay.

As a result, it is imperative that CanPrev has control over their documents, and their document-led business processes. So, CanPrev uses KnowledgeTree’s document management solution to control the creation, organization, and retrieval of these manufacturing documents.

Read the complete case study here.

Following up on last week's announcement of a special offer to SugarCRM customers, I thought I'd include some notes on how document management helps support sales and marketing organizations.

Some Document Management Background

Sales and marketing professionals rely on documents like proposals and collateral to generate leads and close business. It is essential that these documents are appropriately reviewed by the right team members, and that the documents are easily accessible by colleagues across the go-to-market organization.

But reviewing and accessing these documents is not so simple. With thousands of statements of work, proposals, collateral pieces, ROI sheets, and more at their disposal, team members may not be able to sift through content to find the documents that matter. With so much material to review, how can teams ensure that their content has indeed been appropriately vetted?

Sales and marketing teams can regain control by implementing a document management strategy. Document management tools allow teams to access, store, and collaborate on documents. Below are some key best practices to implement when you're looking to start managing your sales and marketing documents.

Organize Documents Effectively

With so many documents, how do you organize your documents? Shared folders are not an effective solution, as they don't allow you to manage multiple versions or find content quickly. In fact, some studies have revealed that by using shared folders, you may waste 50 percent of your time simply looking for a document.

Sales, marketing, services, and other customer facing teams deal with a lot of documents. Management of these documents is often a challenge. Where is that version of the proposal I need? Has the contract been approved? Do I have all of the supporting documents for the proof of concept?

Now, we’ve teamed up with SugarCRM to make document management easy for customer facing teams. If you are an existing SugarCRM commercial customer, you’re entitled to a free 10-user, 12-month online document management account with KnowledgeTree. You can sign-up here, and launch your account immediately. Need a promotion code? Contact your SugarCRM account manager, or contact us and we’ll be happy to help.

HR teams deal with a steady flow of documents that must be controlled. Huge volumes of employee agreements, tax forms, payroll, and other documents are created and processed by HR each day. Mismanaged documents are not acceptable – they can have serious impacts on the productivity of your organization.

The challenge is to give HR teams control over their documents and keep related business processes moving. A best practice approach is to deploy cloud-based document management tools. KnowledgeTree’s Smart Tools let teams manage documents and related business processes from anywhere.

For HR teams, these solutions mean faster approval of employment agreements, policies, and other documents. But how does it work? How do you control the HR documents that your teams depend on?

Document Management From Anywhere In the World

Even if teams are away from the office they are still able to collaborate on their documents through their secure online vault. Teams can comment, share, and edit their documents from anywhere through secure access to their documents from a browser, mobile device, or desktop. Smart Access uses cloud technology to allow teams to connect to the documents that matter without complex VPNs.

Many large companies are taking advantage of Google Apps to boost the productivity of their business teams. That means lots of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations are being built.

If you're a user of Google Apps, you're probably creating great documents that would be valuable to colleagues. Maybe a new sales proposal document, or a contract template for the legal department. You could email everyone to let them know about the new piece of content, but that only goes so far. You want your peers to find that document and recommend it to others. And you yourself, well, you'd love to find an interesting presentation that your colleagues are leveraging.

Document Insights for Google Apps is a new, free tool from KnowledgeTree. It lets users "like" documents in the Google Apps repository. These documents then are surfaced to colleagues, letting them find great content that they need.

The tool helps you:

• Recommend Documents: With a simple “thumbs-up” action, users can surface any document in their Google Docs repository to colleagues in the same Google Apps account.
• Identify Valuable Documents: Coworkers can identify which documents are “most recommended” and “newly recommended”. Dashboards and analytics make it easy to visualize what business documents you must take advantage of.

This post was first placed in Business Cloud News.

Today’s business is global and mobile. That means that you need to collaborate with colleagues, partners, and customers no matter where your team is. How many times have you needed a contract approved while on the road? Or had to access a financial report? Or required feedback from peers about a proposal?

The reality is that business depends on spreadsheets, presentations, and other documents. These documents must be accessible to global teams. And these teams need to efficiently manage these documents – from creation to completion – from wherever.

That is where the power of the cloud comes in. The cloud offers a globally accessible platform that supports business activities. You’re already familiar with how the cloud supports sales and marketing organisations through online CRM. Let’s look at how it can automate and control document-led business processes like Legal, Finance, HR – and sales and marketing.

Sharing Documents

The obvious first advantage of the cloud is its presence. Anywhere that you have internet access, you can get to your cloud-based tools. That means that you can place a key presentation in the cloud and have it immediately accessible to colleagues. Obviously security is the first question that is asked. Companies should investigate the security options (like encryption and group and role-based security, or sign-on via LDAP or Google Single Sign-on) offered by their service providers.

Managing documents is a business challenge. After all, contracts, spreadsheets, and other proposals are the bedrock of your processes.

So, how do you deploy tools that help you control your documents and document-led business processes? In the cloud, in your own datacenter, or via mobile tools?

KnowledgeTree keeps you covered no matter your choice. With the launch of our Private Cloud edition, you can choose a deployment model that makes sense for your organization: software-as-a-service in a secure public cloud or on-premise in a virtualized, private cloud environment.

The Private Cloud edition leverages the proven tools in KnowledgeTree’s software-as-a-service Public Cloud edition. You’ll receive:

• Enterprise-class tools that help organize, manage, and collaborate on business documents. KnowledgeTree customers save thousands of dollars per employee by boosting productivity around document-led processes.
• Easy deployment that lets companies launch a SaaS account instantly, or get a private cloud implementation running in hours, not weeks – no developers required.
• Rich tools that let users access, synchronize, and manage documents from the desktop and within Microsoft Office and Outlook. That means users can control documents from the browser or business productivity tools that they use every day.