What Does It Cost to Manage and Store Electronic Documents
Posted September 19th, 2011 by spalubinsky
I was recently talking with one of our business development executives and he was telling me about a potential client who wanted us to break down the document management and storage costs within our Trusted Repository after a document was eSigned with SmartSign. Well, we went over the general costs and variables including transaction volumes/number documents, their relative size, and their value.
The above three “variables” are not the only things to take into consideration, but for this particular opportunity, it is what is most important to them.
- The transaction volume accounts for how many transactions a company will be completing over a given time period. Will the company be signing 100 docs per day/month/year, you get the point…
- Relative size really means how big your documents are or packages 35KB, a few mgs, or larger.
- The value of the documents translates into, will the documents you are having eSigned have any negotiable/monetary value.
This last point is extremely important – improper storage and management can and will compromise their value.
OK, back to our business development guy and his opportunity. This particular opportunity had some fairly complex and large documents, somewhere around 250kbs, with a high transaction volume, and the docs would be leveraged as collateral. After taking into account all variables, we figured the approximate costs would roughly equal $0.0038 per transaction per month (under ½ cent).
If you are interested in learning more, I would first like you to take a look at what it costs you to physically store and manage your documents. You’ll need to take into account storage space, costs per file cabinet, even administrative costs, among other things. We went over what it costs to have documents signed in a previous post and it may help.



