Audit-proof document archiving
As a managing director or self-employed person, you must reckon with criminal consequences if the documents of your company are not archived in an audit-proof manner.
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Audit-proof document archiving
You want to write invoices on your PC or MacBook? Then you have to reckon with getting mail from the public prosecutor's office. Why? Because invoices and other economically relevant documents have to be archived in an unchangeable way. Anything that is on your PC can be changed, even if it is saved in PDF format. This means that your documents must be archived on a remote data storage device. And in such a way that you can no longer change or delete them.
But that's not all.
You must be able to provide a transaction / project file with one click. The tax auditor does not look for the truth on your PC or in your file cabinet in your filing cabinet but in your audit-proof, electronic document archive.
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Categorization
In order to be able to retrieve archived documents, you have to assign them In addition to the date and some keywords, categorization information must also be assigned to archived documents. With our RoDA principle, we do this in two stages, once with a relevance category and once with a content category. Finally, you have to select the company and the related business process, so that the ManagerCloud can create a business partner or transaction file for you at any time.
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Document Storage
To store your documents, we use AWS (Amazon Web Services), which is the leading and most most widely used technology for this purpose. Your documents are stored in a Frankfurt data center of Amazon, the leading provider of Internet Web Services. Your documents are not archived in a data center in the USA but in a data center in the EU. Amazon not only stores your documents, it also backs them up, fulfilling one of the legal and thus fulfills one of the requirements defined by the legislator for audit security.
Local Copy
Amazon does everything it can to ensure that your documents are securely archived and recovered even after an even in the event of an Amazon IT failure. But you shouldn't be satisfied with that. You can only really sleep well if you still have an additional an additional document copy on a local PC or MacBook. You have total security, if you store it there in a folder that is located in an Apple or Google cloud, for example. Then there are four copies of your document. You can't get much more data security than that.
Retrieval by naming convention
What good is a document copy on your PC or in the Apple/Google cloud, if you can't find it in a confusing, multi-level folder hierarchy? Little. Even on your PC, you have to make sure that you can find your documents again.
To do this, we use the RoDA principle and give your documents a new name that contains all RoDA categorization information when you download them. This allows you to save your documents in a single folder and still find them by using the sorting function of your file system. In this folder, all documents for a customer and process are next to each other, sorted by relevance (importance), content and date. The contracts for the process/project come first because they have the highest relevance category. Then come the documents in relevance category "2" (REQUIREMENTS), such as quotations, orders, invoices, delivery bills, reminders, etc. You will therefore find all invoices for a transaction one after the other, sorted by date. The other relevance categories are CORRESPONDENCE and INFORMATION. Documents to which you have assigned the relevance category INFORMATION can be deleted at any time. All other documents must be archived for years, documents in the relevance category CONTRACT BASIS even for 10 years.
If folders at all, then only a few and all on one hierarchy level
If you do not want to have all documents in one folder, you can differentiate between a customer-, supplier- and authority-folder, maybe also a bank- and an insurance-folder. But there should not be more than that, because otherwise you will get search effort if a document is stored in the wrong folder. Under no circumstances should you create subfolders. If you do that, you give away all advantages, of the RoDA principle and create unnecessary search effort if a document is placed is stored in the wrong folder.