31Oct 2022
Document management is an important part of corporate law. From minute book software to filing employment contracts, a company’s legal documents need to be kept accurate, organized, and safe. They also need to be available when you or your staff need them. Thanks to the rapid increase in remote work in recent years, this means taking things digital.
Why should you digitize your minute books? While minute books contain the corporate records, shareholder details, and other information crucial for lawyers to have on hand, they can also take up plenty of space. Storing and maintaining physical copies of minute books is costly, and moving these records to off-site locations makes them difficult to access for you or your staff.
Minute books in Ontario can be stored electronically —- and doing so can save you time, money, and peace of mind. Whether you’re preparing your office for a digital world or just looking for a way to make some space, here are some of the best reasons to think about document scanning for your law firm’s minute books:
- Minute Book Software Makes Documents Accessible
Minute books are an essential part of operating a business, which means they’re also an essential part of corporate legal practice. Document scanning makes it possible to sort, access, and search through this information no matter where you are, so the reports you need are right at your fingertips, saving you and your clients time.
Scanned minute books are also accessible to you or your staff whether they’re working from home, visiting a client, or out of the office. Not only can you pull up these documents on demand, you can also be sure these digital copies are safe, secure, and free from errors – as well as making them available only to the users who need them (and not the ones who don’t!).
- Minute Book Software Improves Privacy
Traditional safety measures (like a locked door, filing room, or off-site location for paper records) make it possible to control who has access to private documents — but doing this properly comes at a cost. Legal professionals who deal with sensitive documents often spend more money trying to protect these files from theft or damage than it would cost to digitize them.
Scanned minute books offer the user a way to control access and permissions without using a lock, box, or physical vault. IP addresses and usernames can be logged much more efficiently than monitoring physical trips to the filing room, swiping keycards, or changing passcodes — so unless you’re dusting for fingerprints, digital records provide you and your clients with the kind of privacy you can’t get from a filing cabinet.
- Minute Book Software Boosts Productivity
Like any digital document, scanned minute books don’t require hours spent flipping paper. With digital, searchable documents, you can find the information you need, when you need it.
This is especially true for minute books. When a business has been in operation for a long time, their corporate records, meeting minutes, shareholder agreements, or other information can be extensive. Whether it’s you, your staff, your clients, or auditors who require access to these details, turning these records into searchable digital documents can save you plenty of time.
- Minute Book Software Keeps Documents Safe
Digital minute books don’t just give you peace of mind around access restrictions and permitted users. When you ditch the filing cabinet, storage room, or bookshelf full of binders, you also protect original documents from water damage, fire, or other natural disasters.
Documents scanned into the cloud or stored digitally are more easily recovered than paper copies. Since minute books in Ontario are required by law, having digital backups can protect both your professional reputation and that of your clients. According to an article by Forbes, organizations that don’t take storing critical documents seriously are tempting fate. Minute books are some of the most fundamental documents in business — don’t leave storing them up to chance.
- Minute Book Software Reduces Storage Costs
Moving minute books from their cabinets, rooms, and shelves has all kinds of benefits, but one of the most obvious is the extra storage space! Although minute books aren’t something you can ‘Marie Kondo’ out of your law firm, saving floor space, storage costs, security fees, and staff hours definitely sparks joy.
Conclusion
Keeping minute books is essential, but bulky binders and stacks of paper aren’t! With a secure system for storing minute books digitally, you can keep your clients’ documents safe for years to come — saving you space, money, and time.
Want to learn more? Contact us to learn how Docudavit can help you make minute book scanning easy.