A brief guide to digitally storing documents

There are many reasons to store paper documents at your charity’s offices or an external storage facility. HMRC requires you to keep legal and financial documentation, such as invoices, contracts, and bank statements, for six years. If you offer a service that requires you to keep medical records, best practice is to retain them for ten years after the last patient interaction. You may also have documents that relate to donors, service users, volunteers, or research grant recipients that need to be stored safely.

The reasons to go paperless are compelling: costs are lower, security is greater, and any action to reduce the environmental impact of our organisations has become a moral imperative.

We have also seen an acceleration of the trend towards using document management tools to work collaboratively. Early results from the CharityComms 2020 salary and workplace culture survey indicate that more than 50% of respondents would prefer to work 1-3 days from home in the future. The ability to co-create documents in a live environment and digitally archive them is becoming fundamental to the way charities operate.

Six things to look for in a digital document management and storage provider

Document management functions

Your requirements will vary according to your internal processes, but might include:

• Scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) to digitise paper documents and ensure that they are searchable
• An e-signature facility for sign-off processes or documents that legally require signatures
• Live collaborative editing and version control

Integrations

Your document management system should integrate seamlessly with other software that you may be using, such as MS Office or your CRM.

File organisation

Document archives must be easy to create and navigate with adequate storage space for your needs.

Support with GDPR compliance

According to GDPR legislation, records should not be kept for longer than necessary. Time limits may be set legally, in the case of financial documentation, or via your internal policies. Ideally, a document management system should allow for access to timestamping data or even automatic deletion of documents after a specified period.

Security

The ability to encrypt files containing sensitive information for sharing internally and externally may be of particular importance to your work. Secure storage of archived documents is vital for all charities.

Familiarity

An easily overlooked point, but there can be significant advantages to using systems that your staff are familiar with, such as reduced training requirements and increased compliance.