12 criteria for good archiving - analog, digital, with and without an ERP system

Every employee knows where the documents relevant to them are located within an archive. Everyone has access to the required documents at all times. Optimal accessibility would be achieved, for example, if employees could also access all possible documents within the archive from their home office - or on the move. Paper archives cannot achieve this, but digital archives can.

No one is immune to technical damage such as water damage (burst pipe) or fire. Such an event could destroy all paper documents in one fell swoop. Redundant archiving with paper, however, would mean that there is an exact 1-to-1 copy of the corresponding archive at some other location. Impossible with paper. Digital: everyday life.

As shown in the space-saving section, 1,000 documents per week is not the exception. If there are too many documents, it is therefore helpful to supplement the well-thought-out structure and create another way to search your archive. In digital DMS archives, all stored documents are keyworded or indexed, i.e. further information is assigned to these documents at meta level. You can search for these keywords and find all documents even faster.  

For invoices, the keywords we recommend are, for example

• invoice number
• customer number
• booking date
• customer name
• Order number
• Invoice amount
• And other details if necessary

The legal framework for archiving documents - whether digital or analog - is extremely diverse. Extensive blog posts could be written about the legal requirements in Germany alone. In this blog post, we will limit ourselves to presenting the two most important legal criteria for good archiving:

1. Audit compliance
2. Data protection compliance

Managing and archiving documents should be quick and not take much time. Ideally, this “paperwork” or “administration” should be done on the side and nobody has to worry about it. Sounds unrealistic? Not at all, because if you connect your DMS to your ERP, incoming and outgoing documents are archived efficiently and completely automatically, without even one employee having to index documents and upload them manually to a server or the DMS.

Automatically for outgoing documents:

The source of your digital outgoing documents is your own ERP system (e.g. when creating an invoice, order confirmation, etc.). If the ERP and DMS are well connected, the creation of each document in the ERP also leads to its audit-proof automatic archiving in the DMS - including complete indexing. No employee has to rework these documents or file them anywhere.

Automatically for incoming documents:

Documents that arrive digitally as PDFs (e.g. incoming invoices) are opened directly in the DMS. Modern systems have workflow functions and OCR text recognition as standard. As part of the invoice approval process, all relevant data (including that for indexing) is then automatically read from the incoming document in the DMS. If this invoice is then transferred to the ERP system and posted here, it is simultaneously archived with all relevant meta information in the correct place in the DMS. No employee has to do anything here either.

This saves a lot of time and money, as the approx. 1,000 documents per week (see criterion no. 5) are archived almost automatically and completely by the way.