In today’s paperless world, documentation is usually electronic. Most students, teachers, and administrators are increasingly shifting away from older filing systems and pen-and-paper documentation to electronic documentation. Documentation is unavoidable in an educational institution, whether it is a presentation, an essay, official records, or fee receipts. Embracing change and adopting an education document management system is a necessary process that is the first step toward greater transparency and accountability.
Reduced Errors from Data Entry
Record management for educational institutions is still mostly done on paper for several educational institutions. Activities like admissions, student payment records, and more create a vast paper trail. That paper trail can create annoyance and headaches for administrators and departments. But if students have a single master file that all departments can find access to, that leads to lesser errors and increased transparency for both the institution and the student. While an electronic document management has made great strides across several industries, it also offers significant benefits for higher education.
Reduced Errors from Data Entry :
Data entry errors in education are inconvenient and costly. Digitization decreases the chances for human error, particularly regarding data entry.
Automation and Digitization permit your administrative and operations staff to focus more on the student-led competencies and improving their education by taking the manual tasks off their hands. Also, the fewer human efforts are required to enter data, the fewer opportunities for repeated errors like inverting digits into a Social Security number, misspelling the last name, etc.
Reduce Time, Money, and Unnecessary Redundancy :
Where are you duplicating the workflows? How much time are the teaching and non-teaching staff wasting with repeated steps, and how can that be improved? We have extensive experience working with higher ed institutions, government agencies, and large healthcare organizations. That experience provides insights into workflow solutions, improving efficiencies, eliminating those additional steps, and removing silos that make it unnecessarily tough for teams to share standard documentation.
Increased Security :
An education document management system allows you to safeguard all your school’s essential documents, including the research materials, lesson plans, and student information. While the authorized users can easily access the necessary data, unauthorized users are strictly restricted from doing so. Using a DMS in your institutions allows you to track who has accessed a particular document, which of the documents were viewed, and what edits are there that have been made to them. Besides, records can be traced easily, allowing you to create automated alerts during unauthorized access.
Effective Document Backups :
When a physical document is destroyed, it’s disappeared forever. Losing and misplacing the documents can cause a mess, especially in the educational intuitions where thousands of students’ records and administration files are being supervised. Using a document management system for businesses, documents can be easily traced and tracked, unlike the paper documents that must be shelved and require long-term document protection and preservation. With DMS, the documents are less likely to be misfiled; if so, they are easier to locate with cross-indexing. Further, the regular backups are stored in the cloud, making it so that if something is accidentally removed or lost, it can be reclaimed easily.
Online Document Security :
When carried out online, document management not only needs to be efficient, but it also has to offer a broad range of security benefits. Document security protects both the organization and the individual who is sharing (and entrusting) personal and important data.
For college admissions officers, document security can build and establish confidence with incoming students and families. This is particularly true when the information that’s being shared through applications and other documents is private or financial in nature.
Improve Alumni Relationships :
Future funding for the research and campus improvements often falls on the shoulders of your alumni. Providing your alumni relations division secure and faster access to alumni documents empowers them for successful fundraising campaigns, post-graduate relationship-building, and much more.
Final Thoughts
A document management system like SFT Dox can help these institutions maintain the accuracy and security of data, accelerate workflow and enable efficient storage and quick retrieval of documents. Get started today!