5 Benefits of the Paperless Office

At many businesses, if you look in the waste bin or the recycle bin, you'll probably find a lot of paper. Paper is one of the most common waste products at businesses and as such is also one of the biggest sustainability opportunities for businesses large and small. The environmental benefits are great, but going paperless has some huge benefits for small businesses beyond being green.

Less Physical Storage

A lot of offices need to keep their documents and paperwork archived for a certain number of years. This means a lot of storage space is needed. Businesses can clear up a lot of space if all of those documents were digitized. Investing in a self-feeding document scanner will enable you to take documents and store them on your network.

Electronic Fax

Although faxing is not as widely used as email, having your documents digitized means you can send them via fax (or email of course) without printing them out first. Incoming faxes are simply stored as documents and can be emailed to specific inboxes.

Portability

Carrying less paper around is better for security and is much cheaper. Let's look at an example; mortgage lenders can put loan documents on a flash drive and allow for electronic signatures from their customers instead of printing out dozens of pages for the documents. Some businesses have begun to use hosted productivity suites like Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365 to share documents between multiple people in their business, and can access those docs securely from anywhere as long as they have an internet connection. Mobile phones can also store (or access hosted) documents to allow users access anywhere, and there are even solutions to enable customers to sign documents digitally.

Search and Retrieve

When documents are digitized, organizing them and searching for specific documents becomes much easier. You can't go to a filing cabinet and request every document that contains all clients that signed a certain form (at least, this would take considerably longer) compared to running a search on your documents directory on the server.

Document Backup

If there's an easy, fast, cost effective way to backup paper documents without going digital, we haven't heard of it. Once files are stored digitally, you can back them up with your current backup solution. Remember, hard drives don't last forever, so having your data backed up regularly is extremely important. Find a solution that offers incremental backups and offsite archiving.

Long Term Saving

While it may take some time and money to get yourself there, significantly reducing the amount of paper you buy will save you money. Also consider printing costs (toner, printer maintenance and depreciation) and the time spend managing and organizing a physical paper storage system. Going Paper Free requires some investments (scanners, storage solutions, and a fair share of configuration) but the benefits pay off quickly. A lot of companies might not go 100% paper free, but just reducing the amount of paper used and stored is a huge start. If you are looking to evaluate what you'd need to reduce the amount of paper you use and store, give us a call at 607.433.2200.