One of the most challenging parts of running a central bank, credit union, or mortgage company is keeping your clients’ data secure. While it may seem safer at times to keep it all on paper, your greatest advantage in this age is the digital space. You can protect your records from natural disasters and hackers when you have the right set of tools. Are you committing these five financial document scanning mistakes? Keep reading to find out.
Highlighting Important Information
While highlights on paper documents stand out and help you see and explain your forms, any mark that you make will show up blank when you scan. That means highlights will mark out the text that you were trying to showcase once the document is digitized. For documents that you want to scan, you should avoid highlighting and either mark them with a pen or use sticky notes to point out the most important areas of a document.
Leaving Staples in Your Documents
When you are organizing your files to be scanned, you should remove all staples. A staple can damage your scanner, requiring you to replace it. The best way to avoid damage from a staple is to stop using them. Switch to paper clips and ensure that you don’t put them through your scanner either. No metal objects should go through your scanner.
Misplacing Your Digital Files
When it comes to financial document scanning, you are dealing with people’s very personal and pertinent records. You should digitize and back up financial data to ensure you can easily shred the paper copies. Your financial institution can offer better protection with encrypted files. You will easily be able to find your client’s records with optimal character recognition (OCR).
Pro Tip: Keep up with important client files throughout the week! Set up a system to ensure every document that needs to get scanned makes it onto your computer.
Using the Right Scanners
To know if you should invest in on-site scanners, you should consider whether you have regular documents to scan. Further, you should figure out the capacity of the documents you need to scan so you can find a scanner that can handle this task. Large companies that need hundreds or thousands of documents scanned in a day use commercial-grade scanners. You may not need to purchase a scanner if you don’t scan a high volume of documents regularly. If you have a bulk number of files around that need to scan at once, you should hire a document scanning service.
Imaging vs. Scanning
You may find that it is quicker to image documents that you don’t need to manipulate in the future. Imaging is similar to taking a photo of your document. You can save time and money with an imaging machine if you don’t plan to make changes to your documents.
So, are you committing these five financial document scanning mistakes? Now that you know how to avoid the most common errors, you can make the best decision for your business. For bulk scanning projects, choose the professionals at Scanstrong. We pick up your files at your location and transfer them to our secure location for imaging. Once we send your digital records, we shred the paper copies to ensure your office can remain officially paperless. Contact us to get started today.