Ask any one of your employees or coworkers and chances are they can tell you a time when they had difficulty locating a document or file that they needed. Most likely, you’ve also experienced this same frustration yourself.

An inevitable result of being human is that, eventually, we will lose or misplace something down the road. Mistakes like this might not seem like a big deal at first, but they can quickly add up, especially in a business.

Particularly for large companies, document management done wrong has a much more destructive effect than simply causing frustration, and having more employees means the risk of improper document storage is unquestionably higher, as well as the consequence.

The Cost of Poor Document Management

According to IDC, it is estimated that “the typical enterprise with 1,000 knowledge workers wastes $2.5 million to $3.5 million per year searching for nonexistent information, failing to find existing information, or recreating information that can’t be found.”

Another study, found that more than 80% of employees wasted an average of thirty minutes per day retrieving documents, files, and information, and 60% of workers spend an hour or more per day having to duplicate the work of others that could not be located.

Additional data on how costly document management mistakes can be include:

• 90% of corporate memory exists on paper
• Of all the pages that get handled daily in the office, 90% are merely shuffled
• The average document gets copied 19 times
• Companies spend $20 in labor to file one document, $120 in labor to find a misfiled document, and $220 in labor to recreate a lost document
• 7.5% of all documents are lost
• Workers spend only 5-15% of their time reading information, but up to 50% to find it

With statistics likes these, companies are starting to switch to document management software to limit the risk of costly human error.

Microsoft SharePoint

One option business owners have to cut off wasted time and money searching for files is to invest in Microsoft’s premier program for document management, SharePoint. SharePoint stores and tracks files—even different edits of the same file—in one central location, which you can readily access to retrieve the documents you need.

SharePoint also has much broader capabilities when it comes to keeping your business running efficiently. Beside keeping your files organized and secure, SharePoint can also be used to provide:

• Intranet portals
• Document collaboration
• Social networks
• Extranets
• Websites
• Enterprise search
• Business intelligence
• And more…

The inevitability of human error is why implementing document management software like SharePoint is the best solution to avoid the risk and cost of losing files. We are all going to make mistakes, but installing software to cover your back when someone does is one of the smartest ways you can avoid wasting time and money on lost or misplaced documents.

Learn more about SharePoint by visiting our site, or contact one of our document management consultants today.