Though many businesses have moved toward a remote or hybrid work model in the wake of the pandemic, mail is one area that hasn’t quite modernized along the way.
Specifically, you need a physical mailing address to correspond with the IRS, banks, and other entities that require a proof of address. Not having one is a major sticking point for companies wanting to go remote: how can they make the move painlessly?
With digital mailrooms.
Paper documents might not be going anywhere anytime soon, but that doesn't change the fact that they make document management a real hassle for business owners. With so many other business processes to oversee, collecting, storing, and organizing paper mail can be a time-consuming task.
Thankfully, digital mailrooms present a solution to this problem, revolutionizing mail management for businesses of all sizes. Below, we'll discuss what a digital mailroom is, the top benefits of digital mailroom automation, and how to choose the right mail processing service for your needs.
When you work with a digital mailroom provider like Stable, all of your business's paper mail will be sent to the service provider's address. Along with traditional mailroom operations like sorting and storing incoming mail, a digital mailroom scans and digitizes your business's incoming mail. Those scans are then uploaded to your dashboard for online access.
By converting paper mail into digital mail and centralizing it into one easy-to-access location, a digital mailroom can eliminate many of the expenses and hassles associated with managing paper documents.
Before we dive into the top benefits of replacing mailroom processes with a digital mailroom, it's worth taking a little more time to explore how a digital mailroom works.
Every piece of mail that your business receives will be scanned and digitized upon arrival. Stable digitizes every incoming piece of physical mail so that you can access it from anywhere via an online dashboard. From there, you can take action on it like scanning its internal contents (unlimited with Stable, unlike many other digital mailroom services), shredding it, or forwarding it.
Because the mail is digitized, you can also search for information that appears on the mail — such as a bank name, recipient name, or sender. This document scanning process allows Stable to convert physical mail into digital documents that can be uploaded to your business's online dashboard.
If you would like to retain the physical copies of important mail (like legal documents, tax paperwork, lease agreements and other contracts), you can choose to have your mail forwarded to anywhere in the world. Best of all, Stable helps reduce shipping costs by negotiating discounted rates with carriers and offering the option of bulk mail forwarding.
If you don't wish to retain physical copies of the mail your business receives, Stable will store and eventually shred your business's mail rather than forward it. Physical mail is stored for 30 days before it is securely shredded. Even if you choose to have your mail shredded, a digital copy will still be permanently accessible from your Stable dashboard.
Some businesses receive high volumes of checks, and the process of sorting, verifying, and depositing them manually can take hours per week (or more). With a digital mailroom service like Stable, these checks will be automatically deposited to your business bank account on your behalf. This can free up hours of valuable time for finance team members, allowing them to focus on higher-priority tasks.
This eliminates another burden from your shoulders; ensuring that no check is ever lost or misplaced. Even better, this automatic process saves hours of time for your finance managers, who would otherwise be stuck handling manual deposits.
High-quality digital mailrooms like Stable offer user-friendly, cloud-based dashboards for managing your documents online. This streamlines the document management workflow and lets you view your important documents anytime and from anywhere.
From eliminating the hassles of document processing to enhanced privacy and security, using a digital mailroom can offer businesses several key benefits across multiple departments, including human resources, operations, finance, and legal. Some of the top benefits provided by a digital mailroom include:
With a digital mailroom that scans and uploads your business's mail to an online dashboard, you can access all the mail your business receives from any location. This is especially ideal for distributed companies with employees working remotely across multiple states, and large companies that receive a ton of mail every week.
Did you know employees spend an average of eight hours each week managing paper documents? That's a lot of wasted time that could otherwise be spent growing your business and boosting its profitability. With a digital mailroom that centralizes all of your important documents in one place, your employees can spend less time on mail management and more time on other important tasks.
Digital mailrooms provide several process automation features that can further save you and your employees time by streamlining your document processing responsibilities.
One example of process automation that Stable provides is intelligent document processing and data extraction. This allows Stable to automatically scan every piece of mail your business receives and extract key information such as sender and recipient via cutting-edge optical character recognition (OCR) technology. Stable also offers automation features such as automated check depositing and automated mail forwarding.
Stable's digital mailroom can integrate with a wide range of other productivity tools for even greater time-savings. Thanks to these integrations, you can automatically push documents to your Dropbox account, forward mail from Slack, and more.
Reducing the expense of storing and managing paper documents is one of the top reasons why businesses choose to undergo a digital transformation. With a digital mailroom, you won't have to worry about paying for storage space, paper shredders, or paying employees for time spent managing paper documents. This can add up to a big reduction in operational costs.
Physical mail containing sensitive business information can be a serious security risk if it is stolen — and mail theft happens all the time; from March 2020 through February 2021, the Postal Inspection Service received 299,020 mail theft complaints. However, mail stored in a password-protected online account is much more difficult for bad actors to get their hands on.
Digital mailrooms also provide an additional layer of security for businesses that haven’t been strict about where they receive business mail. For example, say that a distributed business uses an executive’s home address as the company’s mailing address. Should that executive leave the company but continue to receive company mail at their home address, this presents a major security and confidentiality risk.
There are several reasons why a company might choose to use a digital mailroom. Your business may be a great candidate for a digital mailroom if:
No matter what line of business you operate or how many people you employ, utilizing a digital mailroom to streamline your document management process can offer a wealth of benefits.
Want to set up a digital mailroom for your business and say goodbye to paper documents? We can help. With Stable, you can set up your digital mailroom in minutes for a price that works with most business budgets. As soon as the setup process is complete, you can enjoy the many advantages of Stable's industry-leading digital mailroom immediately.
To get started saving your business time and money with the best digital mailroom service on the market, sign up for Stable today!
