Many people think that a document management system is just for businesses but they are very wrong. If you have ever searched through the bottom filing drawer or cardboard box at home looking for old bills, your insurance papers or the Cosmetic Dentistry Guide that you just know you had somewhere, then you too could benefit from one.

What is a document management system? In short it is a piece of software that helps you to organise your documents. These can either consist of documents which you have created on the computer such as word or excel; or hard copy bills and other bits of paperwork that you scan into the computer through your scanner.

The great thing is that it saves so much space as you can do away with hoarding bits of paper all over the house and have them online in one central location.

You just give the document a name and assign certain properties to it and then it makes it easier to find again at some stage in the future with the search facility.

Look for a document management system that is easy to install and easy to set up. If you have many scanned documents you may want to choose one that has the capability to do OCR – Optical Character Recognition. This will convert non-editable documents such as a PDF file into editable text which you can then edit and search on.