We have a secure eDocs storage with our ERP and it is customized for school boards so you might have to check out systems that work for your industry. I can tell you that Adobe Acrobat is a must if you are going paperless. All of our payroll (timesheets, HR notifications, etc) are in PDFs and the backup goes into one pdf. We created folders that mimic the paper file system we had. I can review someone else’s backup and add my initials, checkmarks, etc while the payroll I am reviewing has notes and amendments added. Once the payroll is reviewed we ‘sign’ saying we have reviewed it and pass that document on to a hierarchy of reviewers for signatures.
Initially, we hired temp staff to scan all our employee files into the eDocs system. That took an entire year and some departments in our organization have still not gone completely paperless. What we didn’t have completed by 2020 we soon finalized after employees started working from home.
One tip: train your employees to use scanner apps if they are submitting documents to HR or payroll not pictures from their phone camera. There are several free scanner apps for smartphones and it is way easier to manage PDFs than images and they take less storage.
I realize this doesn’t answer all of your questions but I hope you can find some useful info in my response.
