What do you think of when you think of your local city or town hall? Most people don’t tend to think of a fast-paced, highly digitized environment. Especially not a place where they could skip the lines and take care of a task online. From car registrations to land record management, local government is responsible for providing documentation to its residents. However, keeping these documents as part of a manual, paper-based process increases the risk of loss, poor accuracy and storage and safety issues. Digitizing your municipal records, such as land records, assessing files, financial records and meeting minutes, can help you quickly become organized, efficient and in control of the tasks that occur daily at your city or town hall.
Here are five reasons why you should digitize your municipal records:
- Saved Time
When your documents are searchable through the cloud and can be found in a matter of seconds, there is no longer a need to go into a back storage room to search for old files. This allows your staff to focus on the actual tasks at hand rather than spending hours trying to find one record. Less time searching means more tasks completed in one day.
- Increased Security
When you digitize your municipal records, you are ensuring disaster prevention and recovery. What would happen if there was a flood or a fire? How will your documents be protected from becoming ruined? A digital document cannot be ruined by a fire or flood and is accessible at any time. They can be securely stored in the cloud and who can have access to these documents can be controlled. You can even view change logs and activity history on your documents, making them more secure than ever before.
- Easily Compliant
Do you know how long each and every document you have stored in your closet or cabinet needs to be kept legally? By digitizing your documents, this retention schedule can be managed for you. The cloud hosted document management software allows you to set a retention period on documents and notify you if the documents need action or can be removed. Just set it and forget it!
- Less In-Person Activity
Keeping employees and residents safe is top of mind during a pandemic. Digitizing your municipal records, like land records and assessing files, allows you to not only keep your City Hall open and in business, but can also allow you to continue to do your business virtually. This leads to less foot traffic in the offices and keeps everyone safe.
- Saved Costs
When working with a paper-based office and dealing with manual processes, you have to keep up with the maintenance of the readers and printers in the office. Getting rid of the need to maintain these machines not only frees up more office space, but modernizes your town’s operations.
Recordsforce has worked with multiple municipalities throughout the country to digitize their files and import the new digital images directly into their systems. Learn more about our process here.