When coordinating business deals, such as mergers and acquisitions, acquiring new investors, or working with new partners or financial firms, it is important to keep relevant information centralized. That is, materials associated with the deal need to be kept in one location and managed by an appropriate party. Traditional information exchange relied on hard copies, emails, ftp, and other outdated forms of communication. These outdated forms of exchange present numerous problems and can slow a deal down to a crawl.

Why email doesn’t cut it

Email will always have a place in business communication. However, it is no longer an effective means of sharing documents, especially ones that are sensitive and need to be kept secure. Here are some reasons that why email does not serve as a good means of sharing sensitive business files:

  • Emails are hard to organize. Keeping track of threads, CC’ing new users, and determining where attachments are located make for a confusing document sharing process.
  • Emails are hard to track. Once someone receives an email, there is no way to know if they’re forwarding it and to whom they are forwarding it.
  • Emails are not secure. It’s hard to see who is involved, who has accessed the attached documents, and when an email has been deleted. Emails can also float around indefinitely even after a deal is closed.
  • Email can’t handle large files. Email systems generally cap file sizes at a relatively small size, which makes it harder to share large folders, etc.

Centralized Deal Checklist

Making business deals is an involved process. Here are several things to look for that address the problems of email and make your deal process run more smoothly.

  1. Ability to share. Using an online platform can make easy to share documents with internal employees, auditors, attorneys, investors, or any other parties involved with the deal.
  2. Ability to manage users. If you’re going to share sensitive documents, it is important to know who is seeing them. Can employees share with other employees? Can they download a document or simply view it?
  3. Ability to communicate regarding materials. When sharing documents, you’ll want to keep tabs on what has been updated, what has been added or deleted, and whether or not certain parties have viewed the documents.

CapLinked is a service that makes managing documents online simple and secure. CapLinked addresses all the concerns raised in this post regarding email, in addition to adding functionality to make it easier to share, manage users, and communicate. Check out CapLinked’s Product Tour or our free whitepaper on Cloud Security. If you’re ready to give CapLinked a try, click below to start your free demo today.