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Work in the field service industry can get hectic. From small businesses to large, the number of customer records and work orders gathered over the years often becomes overwhelming. Of course, this doesn’t even touch on the records for purchase orders, inventory management, and other vital processes!
The sheer number of records creates a need for proper and secure record keeping. Nearly every facet of a business can benefit from keeping records of some kind. Most departments require record keeping, to some degree or another, in order to function from day to day. With such a daunting number of records in so many locations, all serving a different purpose, storing them quickly begins to take up a lot of space.
Sure, a single paper record doesn’t take up much room, but as a business continues to receive customers and paperwork, a small stack of records quickly becomes an unruly heap. Beyond simply storing this growing clutter, sorting through these papers for a particular record can consume large amounts of an employee’s time. Even with properly separated and organized accounts, you might struggle to fish out a certain form in a reasonable amount of time. And that's if you find it at all! Often, you can put in a ton of work searching for a form, only to realize it has gotten completely lost. With so many papers needing storage and review at any given time, a few invariably go AWOL along the way. This can cause serious issues for a company, depending on the lost form’s purpose.
Data Storage Solutions
Record and data storage is nothing new to the field service industry. Many methods have been devised over the years to reduce clutter in the office and organize files in an efficient manner.
Some old staples? Manilla folders and filing cabinets. With filing cabinets reducing clutter, and properly labelled folders breaking everything up into more reasonable sections, you'll discover a noticeable difference in available space and time for those in the office. A clear location to store and retrieve records greatly reduces data loss in the long term.
Over time however, the folders will begin to wear down through constant use and the ink or marker may begin to smudge. This isn’t the only issue when it comes to physical records. Having all of a company’s information in one place is a data loss disaster waiting to happen. From fire to flood to robbery, any number of problems could occur that could destroy some or even all of those records in a matter of hours. Between data loss concerns, storage needs, and a tedious record review process, the methods of paper storage and review can’t hold a candle to the benefits that proper field service software offers.
Smart Service: Getting Organized with Field Service Software
Smart Service is a scheduling software with the capacity to digitize all those paper records in a single database, which you can access from one or more workstations. By completely removing the need for those bulky filing cabinets, the clutter from all those records becomes a thing of the past!
Not only that, but Smart Service offers powerful searching and reviewing tools to quickly pull up detailed information regarding any account or job. Combined with the capacity to access this information from numerous workstations around the building, Smart Service gives accessibility to your records that is hard to match.
Add Smart Backup to the package, and the chance of data loss is obliterated. Smart Backup is a module for Smart Service that stores all of the vital information handled through the software on a daily basis. With Smart Backup, all of that information gets stored on a series of networks for redundancy. This way, should anything ever happen to the physical database on the computer’s hard drive, all of that data can be quickly restored to its previous state.
Hard drives can and do fail for many different reasons (such as mechanical failure, water damage, and electrical surges). From flood to fire, virtually nothing will permanently destroy the data stored by Smart Backup. Smart Backup provides peace of mind, keeping your company information just a simple data restoration away. Smart Service and Smart Backup work together to provide data accessibility and loss prevention unmatched by traditional paper methods!
