
To Paper or Not To Paper: Going Paperless With HowNow (part 6)
This article is one of a series of articles on going paperless with HowNow. Click here to read part 7 of this series. To read the rest of the articles, head to the Paperless category.
Symptom: Disappearing client files
The great paper chase. Keeping track of whose desk (or floor!) a particular file is currently on isn’t easy. After the walk around the office comes the email out to the entire office.Perhaps some documents haven’t made their way to the paper file yet?
There could be many reasons for an incomplete paper file; all of them stem from the fact that paper filing is labour intensive, consuming precious staff time.There is no record of client meetings and phone conversations in the file. Where are the notes? Still in the staff member’s notebook perhaps? Scratched on the back of an envelope? In their head? Who knows?
Solution
HowNow Document and Email Manager allows any team member to access a client’s file at any time, from any computer on the network whether in the office, at home or travelling. HowNow will control who is editing a document (so you don’t get version control problems) and you can specify who is allowed to see which files.
Filing is done within seconds, and your electronic record-keeping becomes much more comprehensive, reducing the firm’s risk and helping you better manage client relationships by recording ‘the whole story’.
File notes can be created in moments and automatically filed under the client. The title and body of the file note are also keyword searchable for future searches.
The search in HowNow is easy and flexible. Here are some example searches you can do within a couple of seconds. Show me:
– All files for this client
– All emails for this client
– All Excel files for this client
– All files that I created for this client
– All files yet to be completed for this client
– All files awaiting my approval for this client
– All files across all clients awaiting my approval
None of these searches requires you to know in which folder the files are saved; and you can look in multiple folders at the same time.