Document Management System: What Is It & Why Is It Important?

By Adam Walters | 07/24/2023 | 3 min read

Documents are an important part of any practice or firm. You have to manage and safely store client information, data, forms, and paperwork for each client. A document management system is a solution to help make managing all of those documents easy; helping you save time and money.

Find out more about what a document management system is, why it’s important for your firm and the benefits it provides.

What is a document management system?

A document management system is a software solution that helps your firm securely upload, organize, modify, sort, share, and store documents.

Their role is to help make your firm become more organized when dealing with documents. A document management system provides a standardized format across all documents, ensuring that each one is stored, labeled, and handled in the same way; making it easy to find the document you need when you need it.

Why is a document management system important?

A document management system is important for your firm because it takes all of the responsibility for document management and digitizes it. Rather than having to manually upload and sort through files and dealing with manual data entry errors or mislabeled files, a document management system standardizes the entire process.

With this process, a document management system is able to streamline your workflow, helping everyone in your firm get more done with their time and allowing them to work on more important tasks.

A document management system can help your firm:

Streamline your workflow
Significantly reduce manual data entry errors
Automate processes
Control access to secure or sensitive information

How does a document management system help your firm?

A document management system helps your firm by creating a secure, standardized practice for all documents within your firm. This might sound simple, but this “minor” improvement is anything but minor.

Standardizing how documents are stored and managed means that lost, misplaced, or forgotten documents are a thing of the past. When every document is labeled and indexed in the same way, it creates a database of documents that are easy to search. This allows employees to reliably and quickly find the documents they need when they need them.

Saving only a few minutes when working with a client doesn’t seem like much. However, when viewed across your entire firm and all of your clients, saving around ten minutes per client can quickly add up. The best news? Ten minutes is a conservative guess as to how much time and money the right document management system could save you.

Steven Kurinsky from Deleon & Stang said, “. . . we save about 30 minutes on every tax return that we process. That is an estimated savings of $150 on every return that we prepare, which translates to $525,000 saved per year on tax returns alone.”

When you remove the added responsibility of document management from your firm, you enable everyone to spend time on more meaningful and profitable tasks, giving you the time, money, and space for growth.

A system you can trust

With over 40 years of industry experience, IRIS’s document management system solutions are built with your firm in mind. Our goal is to provide you with the tools you need to grow, and grow with you.