Document management is a vital but often overlooked part of business operations. Small and growing businesses in particular are vulnerable to losing control of their document workflow when information is scattered across multiple documents and file types on different tools and systems.
Document management describes the entire process of creating, organising and retrieving documents in various formats. It looks at the entire document lifecycle at any stage.
If you plan to implement a document management system to gain better control over your documents, there are a few tasks to complete first.
Dan Smith, Head of Revenue Operations at Altron Document Solutions, says the starting point is always a structured discovery of the client’s existing data estate rather than a product demonstration. However, a document solutions expert can help guide an entrepreneur through the process.
“We prefer to review the volume and format of documents, the quality of the metadata attached to them, and the extent to which invoices, contracts and certain records are already digitised. We also map where records are currently stored, whether in shared drives, e-mail inboxes, legacy archives, or line-of-business applications, because a DMS can only be as reliable as the material placed in it by users,” he explains. “Where we find gaps, we recommend a cleansing and classification phase before migration, with naming conventions and retention rules agreed by the records owners. That phase usually determines whether the project delivers value in its first year, so we treat it as a commercial priority rather than a technical afterthought.”
Responsible Document Management Creates End-to-end Accountability
Smith explains that a robust document management system (DMS) helps employees take responsibility for their respective inputs at various stages. “Organisations that measure this well define ownership at each stage of the document lifecycle, from capture and indexing through approval, storage, retrieval, and eventual disposal, and then track performance against those owners.”
He adds that clients can set a small number of measures at first: the time taken from capture to approval, the proportion of documents indexed correctly at first pass, exception volumes in approval workflows, and the number of retrieval requests that remain unresolved after an agreed period. “Each measure needs a named business owner, not only an IT sponsor. We also recommend a quarterly review in which finance leadership examines these figures alongside audit findings, because accountability becomes real when the people who rely on the records are also the people who report on them.
“This may seem an admin burden, but it really is the living and breathing aspect of a DMS that delivers on its promise.”
DMS Is Particularly Important to Financial Departments
Smith adds that, in his experience, the criteria most often overlooked is how a system keeps pace with regulations and rules rather than features – especially in the financial department. “Finance teams typically confirm that a DMS may store a VAT invoice, but fewer test whether retention periods, e-invoicing formats, and audit extracts match what the revenue authority requires in terms of compliance. We encourage evaluators to ask how the provider updates its compliance configuration when legislation changes, who is accountable for that update, and how long deployment typically takes. Data residency and the location of backups deserve just as much attention, as do the provider’s local support presence and the availability of an audit trail that an external auditor can read without vendor assistance.
Tool Fragmentation Impacts Productivity
Another reason for businesses to prioritise document management solutions is that fragmented tools impact productivity; if no one knows who is responsible for what.
“Most organisations begin by measuring time rather than cost, because time is easier to observe and more persuasive for a finance committee. A practical approach is to sample a representative group of staff over two weeks and record how often they search for a document, how many systems they open to complete a single approval, and how frequently they re-request a file that already exists elsewhere in the business,” Smith explains.
“That information can be converted into an annual productivity figure using loaded staff costs, giving the business a baseline against which the new system can be measured.”
Implementing DMS Effectively
Smith notes that the most successful rollouts treat training as a sequence rather than a single event. “Begin with a small group of process champions drawn from key users, who learn the system in depth and become the first point of contact for their colleagues. Conduct short training sessions that are tied to tasks people perform every week, rather than a long course that staff forget within days. Go-live must also be scheduled outside of month-end and tax deadlines and by running old and new processes in parallel for a defined period.
“Where internal teams are stretched, we carry most of the configuration and content migration work so that their time is spent on decisions only they can make.”
Smith also adds that partnering with a document management expert, when the conversation of AI comes up, continuous improvement and validation also need to be a part of the conversation.
“Continuous improvement for AI models trained on local financial documents depends on governance as much as on technology.” He continues to draw on his own experience at Altron Document Solutions to explain how AI can be used in conjunction with a DMS to deliver effective results. “We keep a human in the loop for any extraction or classification that affects a financial record, with confidence thresholds below which documents are routed for review. Accuracy is measured against a sample of documents that the client’s own staff have verified, and that benchmark set is refreshed as formats change, for example, when suppliers alter invoice layouts or local reporting requirements shift.”
He also highlights that this is a technology that continuously evolves, and therefore, using AI with document management solutions also needs to be updated. “Model changes are versioned and tested before release, and clients receive a quarterly summary of accuracy results. We believe clients should retain control over their training data, and we make that commitment explicit in the contract, including where data is stored and how it may be used,” he concludes.
