My name is Ashwin van der Flier. I am owner of the office here in Broek op Langedijk, North Holland. The company is called Van der Flier The Netherlands B.V. and we are focused on administrative and tax consultancy for SMEs. In the Netherlands we focus mainly on the administrative side: annual accounts, all necessary tax returns, in addition we do quite a bit of tax consultancy and at the international branch, we advise a lot of SMEs that operate across borders, we set up legal structures, we do tax consulting and we also do tax advisory services for high net worth individuals who have assets in multiple jurisdictions. All international business is done from our other location in Hong Kong. The company in the Netherlands is a family business. We have been in business for almost 30 years and I run it together with my brother.
Primary starting point for us with documents and data is of course security. We have a lot of privacy-sensitive data and of course we want to store it safely, but we also want it to be accessible and manageable. Given our sector, we obviously have to comply with all regulations, to ensure that all data is stored securely, that proper back-ups are made. In addition to that, of course, we have to also ensure that it’s easily accessible for all our employees and because the employees are in different locations, we must also have access to it from all kinds of places in the world.
We would like to have an online system that is accessible from anywhere and that we have a certain structure which was lacking in all the other systems that we had running before. Those were often not auditable. We had a very hard time putting in place certain grids and structure. From a security point of view and in terms of retrievability of documents we saw quite a few limitations with other document management systems. The moment we started working with Hyarchis Comply, that was it, the problem was solved right away as those were the important points that we wanted to have in the new system. We had quite a proliferation of folder and document structures, that actually led to problems in findability. We had a lot of employees and all of them used to set up files in their own way and the folder structure was just unclear. The employees were actually given the space to come up with their own document organizing systems. We just wanted to avoid that confusion, so we actually wanted to set up a fixed structure for each case and that was actually not possible, so we did have to move towards a good manageable system. The predefined templates could actually make it much clearer and that’s how we wanted it to be as it made the findability, searchability and the storage much easier with Hyarchis Comply.
To my colleague, I would say that you have to think carefully about your requirements for document storage and data management. Make sure you look for a secure and accessible solution that has a lot of manageability in terms of the directory, folder and data structure. As a financial and tax service provider we are of course subject to strict requirements and we have to make sure that: we store documents correctly, we can trace what happens to them and who has the access to it. It’s also important for us to maintain the version control properly, so that we have everything in good order. In addition, of course, it is also very important that we store documents in a secure way, enabling back-ups so that in case of a loss of data we would be able to retrieve it. That is a very important point for us.
