How To Easily Set Up Your Records Management System?

Preface

A digital records management system is designed to store important company records safely to ensure compliance. A dedicated software for managing digital records is easy to set up. Learn how you can set up WeP records management system in a few simple steps to begin your business digitization journey.

Table of contents

• What is a records management system?

• How does this help in making sure your business meets its compliance requirements Why is records management important to businesses?

• How to set up your records management system

• What are the benefits of setting up a digital records management system?

• Conclusion

Brand snippet

WeP records management system enables you to leverage compliance-assured storage capabilities for safely and securely storing your business records. Call us to get the best cloud-based affordable solution that supports integration with numerous enterprise applications for easy record sharing.

What is a records management system?

Business records are different from business documents. While documents are used in day-to-day activities and edited multiple times, records remain unedited after the content is approved and finalized.

Examples of company records include employee records, contracts, government notices, tax documents, legal notices, and other documents that define regulations and rules. A digital records management system caters to the specific needs of different types of records to ensure integrity and compliance based on the scope of usage.

How does this help in making sure your business meets its compliance requirements?

Organizations have to store records about all the stakeholders involved in the business. Maintaining and managing these records by adhering to compliance requirements is vital for risk management. These records have strategic business value and need to be accessed immediately whenever the need arises.

The international standard ISO 15489 defines records management as the process of receiving, creating, and maintaining information concerning an organization or person, which must comply with legal obligations and business transactions. Ensuring compliance of records manually is time-consuming and ineffective.

A records management system enables the systematic application of disciplined management techniques. This system makes it easier to ensure that the records align with company and legal principles and policies. As non-compliance leads to severe penalties for enterprises, organizations must use electronic record management system software to propose, develop, and apply necessary compliance policies and procedures. 

A records management system allows the creation of regulatory schedules to protect records against unauthorized access or loss. It ensures reliability, authenticity, usability, and accessibility, and allows records to be audited irrespective of the changes.

Why is records management important to businesses?

Organizations have the responsibility of storing records in a safe and secure location. While providing easy access, the enterprise must also implement access control.

Broadly, businesses have to deal with challenges related to data capture, storage, and protection.

The vast amount of company records has to be captured properly to ensure accuracy. The captured data must be stored in secure vaults, limiting access only to authorized personnel. The data must be protected at all costs because sensitive, personal, and financial information must be kept private and secure.

• Following are some challenges that organizations face in record management:

• Overload of information is a critical challenge because the data that comes into the organization keeps growing

• Employees don’t have enough time to deal with the increasing number of records

• Data accuracy is crucial to making vital business decisions, but multiple copies of records affect the accuracy

• Data integrity issues are common when records are scattered throughout the organization

• Ensuring compliance and adhering to regulatory laws concerning privacy and security is difficult

• Digital assets stored across multiple locations are difficult to access

• Setting up a tracking system of records is hard

• Disorganized records stored in multiple places are challenging

• The retrieval of records becomes difficult without proper organization

• Setting up and establishing a record retention schedule (RRS) is impossible without proper record management

How to set up your records management system?

Company records may be available in paper or digital format. Usually, enterprises have a large number of both paper and digital records, and they need file management software to standardize all types of records. Such a system helps organizations to maintain records throughout the records management lifecycle.

You can set up a record management system in the following steps:

• Create a complete and detailed inventory of all records. Before starting to implement a new system, you must gather all the data that must be stored, maintained, and accessed.

• Determine access control and management control because all employees do not use company records. At this stage, you have to define who manages the records and what processes are involved in record management.

• Create a records retention schedule to define the records management lifecycle. Records are not stored endlessly and come to the end of their lifecycle at some point. When a record expires or is no longer needed, the schedule should outline ways to destroy records adhering to compliance requirements.

• Determine the right way to organize, store, and manage records depending on company policies. On-premise data storage requires IT infrastructure implementation, while cloud-based storage offers more security.

• Create a detailed record management plan to ensure that the management avoids inefficiency or data loss.

• Finalize a disaster recovery plan for optimal risk management. While a record management software ensures safe and secure storage, a robust disaster recovery plan is critical.

• Train your employees to use the digital records management system.

• Implement the best records management software and follow up with regular auditing

What are the benefits of setting up a digital records management system?

The main purpose of a digital records management system is compliance assurance. Apart from this, it improves traceability, efficiency, and productivity.

Some of the benefits of a digital records management system are:

• Reduced storage space with more control over generation and growth of records

• Effective retrieval and disposal of records

• Easier implementation of new records management technologies

• Ensuring legal and government regulatory compliance

• Improved litigation risk management

• Protecting integrity and privacy of important information

• Reduced efforts, time, and money in storing and protecting digital records

• Managers can make better decisions as digital records deliver strategic values

Conclusion

A records management system enables easy creation, maintenance, and destruction of records throughout their lifecycle. Records are indexed with associated business transactions so that managers can get all the information they want with a few clicks. Multiple departments can access the same record, and there is always a single source of authenticity with an efficient records management system. Enterprises can benefit from such systems to manage employee records efficiently.

WeP provides an agile and productive records management system that enables organization-wide records availability while ensuring data integrity, security, and privacy.

Records are stored in a centralized location, ensuring seamless collaboration. Contact us to know the best way to store your company records in encrypted e-lockers.