How many hours per week will your affordable housing group expend searching through file cabinets searching for the document needed? Five, ten, fifteen or more? Whatever the amount might be, there can be a solution that can reduce this figure to zero. The answer is to take your agency paperless.
Because there never appears to be sufficient office and file space, public housing groups that battle with too much paperwork can not be as business efficient as they would like to be. Online document management software allows these agencies to properly and securely organize their data and organizational documents, such as applications, loan and mortgage documents and funding contracts.
Besides paper and document processing, housing departments have 3 additional main concerns: complying with record keeping and reporting laws, reducing administrative expenses and distributing their grant money as efficiently as possible. The best way for affordable housing agencies to deal with paperwork influx, reduce costs, more easily comply and distribute resources is to implement an online document management and compliance application that includes workflow automation.
In addition to workflow automation, document management software systems offer document capture, routing plus storage. These features are useful for departments that deal with the maintenance of tedious information such as applications, re-certifications, inspection documents, financial documents, any audit-able documents, etc.
So what happens when two or more workers simultaneously access and change or revise a document? This is when you want a system that contains document version control and revision tracking. With these capabilities, the solution tracks and records who and at what time someone accesses and edits a document, saves every version and continually displays the most up-to-date edition. This way, employees do not worry about using the incorrect version of any document.
Because an electronic document management service is web-based, there are cost-saving benefits. With the huge amount of paperwork that affordable housing groups handle each day, they are continuously struggling to come up with enough office space to save and file information, resulting in more expenses. An online service converts paper documents to electronic documents eliminating the requirement for office storage space, not to mention removing paper processing, printing and photocopying costs.
Now, onto Records Management. With a system that comes with a Records Management module for compliance, the application tracks document retention periods and will alert you when its deadline has passed, and the document needs to be purged. This functionality is particularly helpful to avoid compliance issues that arise from surprise audits.
Document management software maximizes business effectiveness for housing departments as they distribute their grant money. With easy-to-use online access, the affordable housing department can now drag and drop or import electronic documents, or scan the paper documents into the system where all information is saved and routed through the appropriate workflow.
In addition to endless paperwork, housing groups also daily receive a plethora of emails. A document management system categorizes and archives emails and faxes as they are continuously received. System users are able to then go back and easily retrieve archived emails using a text search.
With all of these time and cost saving benefits, there is no reason not to consider an online document management solution for your affordable housing department. Start by doing your homework and researching software programs that offers all and more of the benefits mentioned. And don’t forget, choose an application that can deal with ALL of the requirements of your department.