Paperlessness unlocks savings for advisory firm

Harvest Financial, a California-based independent advisory firm, enjoyed significant savings as a result of a six-year effort to adopt paperless processes and streamline its information management, according to a recent article in Financial Advisor Magazine.

The company's owner, Chad Daniels, detailed the different forms of savings that his business realized as a result of going paperless. In addition to the financial benefits, which took the form of reduced rent and insurance costs, the firm also conserved space by repurposing a filing area, and saved time by making its document retrieval system more efficient.

Daniels enlisted the help of Harvest's part-time workers to scan the multitudes of paper files containing nearly two decades' worth of documentation. After the document imaging project was complete, however, he faced an organizational conundrum.

"You have to think about setting up a filing system that mirrors how you organized the drawers of your file cabinets," he told the news source, warning against perceiving enterprise content management solutions as "plug-and-play software."

For small businesses, another benefit of document conversion is related to expansion. When independent firms like Harvest look to set up additional locations, the advantages of not having to track down and copy individual physical files are substantial.

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