Go Green and Create a More Effective Credit Union with Document Management

This week’s annual celebrations and educational efforts supporting Earth Day show the fight for a clean environment continues. While your credit union may encourage employees and members to recycle their Coke cans and plastic water bottles, is that enough when you repeatedly print out extensive loan packages to transport them 200 miles to headquarters?

That’s where document management, or enterprise content management (ECM) software, comes in. The most obvious benefit of document management software is that it decreases your dependency on paper. But digitizing records and invoices offers numerous other benefits for your credit union, including:

• Automating document retention
• Simplifying records management
• Responding to audit requests and legal concerns without hesitation
• Safeguarding sensitive member or employee data

There are three key ways document management lessens your impact on the environment while making your credit union faster and more accurate.

1. Reducing paper use        

Deploying document management software dramatically reduces your credit union’s reliance on paper. You simply scan all incoming paper mail, invoices and other documents. Your document management solution immediately archives the scanned information as digital images – like emails – in an easily accessible central location. Users then file, search, annotate, share and process these documents without ever reverting back to physical paper.

By moving to a more paperless office environment, you eliminate archive rooms, filing cabinets and storage areas. This helps cut costs like heating and cooling those storage rooms. And by reducing your reliance on paper, you take a proactive approach to disaster recovery.

You can also do more with less by using electronic document workflow to automate manual and paper-based processes. Instead of wading through tons of emails, searching through desks or waiting for documents to eventually make their way to you through interoffice mail, workflow automatically routes them to the appropriate people. It also alerts stakeholders that work has moved forward and is ready for the next step, speeding up processes like loan originations.

2. Eliminating printing and photocopying

Printing and photocopying are expensive and environmentally unfriendly processes. In today’s efficient paperless offices, fax machines and massive printers are not commonplace.

By using document management, you cut the amount of printing and photocopying required to run your business. It enables users to view, edit and share documents with colleagues in an entirely digital format. You take care of all the tasks that used to require users to print or photocopy documents in digital form. No more printer cartridges, no more photocopy repair calls for help.

3. Cutting down on couriers

Not only are couriers costly, they add days to the lending approval process and they are not environmentally friendly. Courier and mail services that transport member documents and lending packages between braches are an often overlooked environmental impact of paper-based processes. Adopting a truly paperless office eliminates the use of polluting courier trucks.

You and your credit union can make a real difference. When you reduce your use of paper, you increase your speed and accuracy while you cut costs. The planet – and your members – will thank you.