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It is a fairly common question in the document storage and archiving field these days, but can your business benefit further from moving on to digital document archiving and replacing your old filing systems?

The answer for the most part is usually, yes, of course you can, but it does invariably depend on the kind of business that you’re in. Although pretty much anyone in any line of business can benefit from digital document storage, it is without doubt much more effective the more documents that you have to store and can be of even greater benefit depending on where you’re actually storing them.

For example, if you are a company that has a few documents that are used and accessed on a regular basis, you could benefit from digital storage, but it could be seen as overkill and not necessary. If you’re a company that has hundreds, thousands or even millions of documents, then digital document archiving is pretty much made for you. With levels of documents on that scale being accessed on a regular basis, there is pretty much no way that you wouldn’t benefit from going digital, whether it’s in the space you would save, the costs, the improvements in efficiency, productivity and staff morale, it will be an advantage for you in one way or another, or even in many ways.

After all, digital document storage and management was made to make life easier and make going through and finding documents a breeze, it’s been that way since the first incarnation of a computer with a word processor, but it’s only now that we’re fully taking advantage of the benefits.

It’s also a surpringly simple process to get your documents digitised. Obviously, if you have very few you can scan them in yourself and name them whatever you wish to help you find them easily on your computer system. However if you have documents in the thousands, it’s highly recommended to use a document scanning and archiving company to do this for you. They can usually scan thousands of documents every single day and because of this charge a relatively small fee for doing so. They are also able to index the documents however you wish to make finding them extra easy and many can even offer OCR services to make the scanned file completely text-searchable and readable by your computer systems. This adds further benefits to having your documents digitised for archiving purposes.

Employees Want Them and More Employers are Offering Them – The Competition is Heating Up

According to benefit trends surveys by MetLife, The Hartford, Colonial Life, and LIMRA, as well as research executives within companies such as Transamerica, there are surprising numbers reflecting the building trends in our voluntary employee benefits market, see here:

• 5 in 10 employees believe voluntary benefits are “very” or “extremely” important
• 7 in 10 employers believe their employees don’t even want voluntary benefits at all
• Less than 1 in 10 employees will say they want voluntary benefits when asked by their employer, yet more than 6 in 10 employees get the voluntary benefits when just offered them by their employer
• More than 9 in 10 Americans would be forced to change their lifestyle if they lost a portion of their income for 3-6 months
• More than 1 in 2 employees say they are very worried about the gaps in medical insurance
• More than 6 in 10 Gen Y, Gen X, younger and older baby boomers understand they get a better deal, better education, a nd easier management of their voluntary coverage as a benefit than individually outside of the workplace
• More than 4 in 10 of younger to middle aged employees say a choice of benefits that meets their need is extremely important for creating loyalty
• Nearly 1 in 2 HR Managers and Benefits Administrators plan to add voluntary benefits
• 1 in 2 employers plan on increasing employees’ health insurance premiums, deductibles and/or copays
• Over 99 in 100 employers agree employees need guidance for benefits decisions
• 1 in 2 companies with at least 1,000 employees are interested in transitioning their existing benefits to voluntary benefits
• More than 1 in 2 US employers offer voluntary benefits right now
• Uncertainty in the economy, shoestring budgets, living paycheck to paycheck, bankruptcies, foreclosures, and debt problems are causing even voluntary legal services and voluntary tax services to skyrocket in popularity, with a combined influence of being offered in over 3 in 10 Fortune 500 companies thus far

How Long Do I Have?

The obviousness of the truth is here – voluntary employee benefits are leading the trend and the new question is, “How soon before I am losing top talent to my competitors because of their voluntary benefits?”

Extremely Affordable…Extremely