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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Legal professionals don’t have a lot of free time in their working days. Online and mobile tools are a life-saver, helping to boost productivity. Here are five more tools that we think are valuable to help lawyers stay efficient.
We help a lot of corporate counsels, lawyers, and other legal professionals to manage their core legal documents. Manage approval processes, archiving of records, and more. While you're reading, please download our Legal eBook to find out how these legal organizations are managing their contracts, agreements, and other documents efficiently. But now, to the tools!
Called “the standard of excellence in legal language,” this popular resource is now at your fingertips. Using your iPhone or Android device, browse more than 45,000 legal terms gathered from over five centuries of lexicographers.
Need to quickly locate a legal reference? The simple interface in this mobile app allows you to search through the law libraries from all 50 states using keywords, natural language or citations. Easily find cases, statutes, regulations, court rules, constitutions, newspaper archives and more.
The major challenge that faces legal teams when they have to develop an important contract or proposal is managing the approval process. Typically, teams are comprised of multiple departments that have to review and make relevant changes to a contract before completion.
These teams aren't static. They are constantly moving in or outside the office and have a dozen other projects to deal with simultaneously. How can teams collaborate on the contract and also keep draft changes and revisions managed and organized for review?
Imagine a contract’s lifecycle. It has to go through finance, HR as well as back to the legal department that created it. To keep all teams aware of changes, the legal department will make sure that every team is instantly notified of all drafts.
Convenient, and easy-to-use calendar items alert teams that the contract is ready for review. If that critical contract has to be ready at a certain date or within a particular time period, customize your alerts so the contract isn’t stalled. Maybe only the finance department has to make changes to the contract. Well, notify only that department. No more time wasted organizing mass emails.
