Financial institutions and startups rely heavily on document management and generation in their operations.
Since these documents contain data about their business – their clients, processes, and other important business decisions, it’s essential they’re error-free and accurate.
Processing and analyzing the data provide financial institutions the basis for making an informed decision.
In an increasingly digital economy where information in business documents has become easier to review and use in decision making, document management and automation must be a top priority.
Financial institutions and startups cannot understate the importance of document management.
This could spell the difference between the success and failure of your business.
In addition to making a data-based decision, you have to make sure important documents don’t get leaked, everything is securely stored in one place, and the right people can access the right documents instantly.
Thus, it’s a no-brainer for financial organizations to implement a document management system.
Which is exactly what we’ll cover below.
Here’s what we’ll cover below:
- Getting Started with Document Management for Finance Startups
- 5 Essential Document Management System Features For Finance Startups And Organizations
- Document Management Automation: The Right Solution For Your Financial Organization?
Getting Started with Document Management for Finance Startups
A document is a piece of written, printed, or electronic record of data or information relevant to your business.
Business documents include regulatory papers, company policies, contracts, communication messages, and more.
We may not be conscious of it, but these documents go through a lifecycle from inception to disposal.
Typically, a document management lifecycle includes the following steps:
- Creation.
- Sharing.
- Review.
- Storage.
- Deletion or archival.

With all the types of documents in a business going through all these processes, it can be tricky, if not difficult, to keep track of all of them.
According to research, it takes an average of 18 minutes to find a document. And employees spend up to 2 hours each day looking for files and work documents.
All these hours in a day add up to a significant time in a year just looking for documents.
In addition to being unnecessarily time-consuming, your employees could be spending their time on more productive and important tasks. Instead of manual tasks they probably hate doing.
This is where document automation and management come in.
Document management is the process of automating document filing, distributing, storing, and retrieving physical or electronic files.
All this happens through an electronic document management system software, which essentially helps companies streamline document management throughout their lifecycle.
For documents that are frequently used, having templates on hand is a must.
Document templates are pre-created formatted forms that contain or gather the information necessary for their intended users.
Here’s an example of what a dynamic financial template can look like from SampleTemplates.

For more examples, other types of financial documents to automate often include:
- Information notices.
- Invoices and bills.
- Tax documents.
- Agreements and claims.
- Request forms.
- Customer service communication.
- Purchase orders
- Demand notices
- And more.
Now that you have an idea of how financial startups and organizations can use automated document management, let’s take a look at some essential features that make all this possible.
Then, we’ll help you decide on whether or not document management is the right solution for your financial team below.
5 Essential Document Management System Features For Finance Startups And Organizations
A sound document management system should be able to accommodate everything a financial company needs within its document workflow and operations.
As mentioned above, document automation enables financial institutions to electronically design and use standardized documents to:
- Create.
- Collect.
- Share.
- Process.
- Store.
- And retrieve data for workflow efficiency.
In short, automated document generation is a great way to save time and money.
That’s because, according to research:
- Workers spend 19% of their time searching for and gathering information. Which then accounts for them losing 50% of their time every week.
- And they spend 30% of their time searching for, managing, and preparing data. And 20% on duplicating work.
- Additionally, you save money on printing and other paper-based operations. Most businesses that go paperless achieve full ROI within 12 months.
Now, let’s get back on track and explore some essential document management system features that make all this possible for finance teams.
Functionality
First, you’ll want to determine if the document management system is an ideal fit for your financial organization.
Check whether it will function solely for managing files or documents or whether you can integrate it into other systems used by the business for communications, scheduling, or other areas of operation.
In terms of integration, you should be looking into how seamlessly it plugs into your existing system and tools like:
- Your CRM.
- Segment.
- Zapier.
- Document management software.
- And others.
See our guide on automated PDF generation for financial digital transformation for more info on how this works.

You also want a document management system that is intelligent and capable of understanding organizational hierarchy.
Ensure that the system has extensive search functionality such as categorization and tagging to allow users to retrieve data instantly.
Collaboration
Your document management system should be designed to allow collaboration across departments. All while being secure so that only certain people can access specific documents.
This way, you can also ensure no sensitive information or customer financial data leaks or gets out.
Since it’s extremely common to work across different departments in financial organizations, being able to collaborate on document management is a great way to save time.
It allows immediate feedback across the hierarchy of an organization.
If your document management system allows for document collaboration, then the rules for sharing and permission to access documents must be clearly spelled out.
To take this a step further, you can also incorporate user role setup and management.
This means that there are different user roles in your software security management system with different permissions.
This way, someone who’s a new hire in your financial organization will not be able to access your oldest client data straightaway, for example.
Or, alternatively, you can set it up so they can view the document but not make any edits.
These user roles include:
- Primary owner.
- Admin.
- Editor.
- Contributor.
- And viewer.
Of course, the actual actions allowed in the tool depend on its functionality and you can choose custom access permissions as needed.