Many human capital management (HCM) solutions claim to do it all: payroll, benefits administration, onboarding and maintaining employee data. But if your HR organization has undergone an internal or external audit or legal discovery, you’ve learned from hard experience that there’s one thing it doesn’t do: manage HR documents. 

In The New HR Tech Stack: Why Document Management Is in the Spotlight, we explain why—and show you how adding a state-of-the-art HR document management system can save your organization time, money and energy better spent on strategic initiatives. 

Where the #$%! Are Our Documents?

Sure, your HCM can hold HR documents as file attachments, but “holding” isn’t the same as “managing.” Chances are, your critical documents are maintained in multiple systems and locations and in multiple forms, both paper and electronic. That can make gathering documents for an audit or legal discovery a time-consuming manual nightmare. And when you have finally gathered them, they can be difficult to share securely. Even worse, there is no easy way to know if documents are complete and up to date.

HR Document Management: Our Hero

This is where a dedicated HR document management system steps up to the plate. Think of it as document command central: A single location to organize, maintain and find all your HR documents. You can scan paper documents directly into the software, which integrates with your HCM system and other HR technology solutions to index and store all employee-related documents. The system automatically applies metadata, so your staff can spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time on high-value work.

But that’s just the beginning of the story. Once your documents are in the system, they can be easily shared without compromising security. Instantly pull specific document types across any employee population and share them with internal or external business partners. You can limit access by role, document type and other configurable criteria, as well as set an expiration date for any document you share, and even restrict printing, downloading or emailing. All the while, the system maintains a complete audit trail of every action taken on each document. 

A state-of-the-art HR document management system can also help ensure your employee files remain complete and current to reduce compliance risk. Using sophisticated automation, the system can send automatic alerts to employees to supply missing documents without HR intervention, and provide preemptive warnings that a document, such as a license or certification, is approaching its renewal date.

Finally, a dedicated HR document management system can help to enforce a compliant and defensible retention policy. You can set retention periods for different document types and even within different jurisdictions to make sure that you hold documents as long as necessary—and no longer. 

Take the next step in your HR organization’s digital transformation by adding a state-of-the-art HR document management solution, such as CartaHR, to your HR tech stack. You’ll be rewarded with more time and resources to devote to the work that really matters. Download the ebook today to learn more.