Technology has taken over our everyday lives. Postage and newspapers are both declining in numbers. As a society, we want to consume information quickly and easily, but business offices have been moving in the opposite direction. Offices use more than 12 trillion sheets of paper every year, and in the last 20 years, paper usage has increased by 126%. Moving to a paperless office will not only benefit the environment but also benefit your business in more ways than one.
Cost Effective
A box of printer paper costs approximately $40 for 5,000 sheets of paper. That doesn’t seem too bad, right? However, the average office worker uses more than 10,000 sheets of paper each year. Let’s say you have 10 employees, that equates to $800 a year you are spending on just paper. We haven’t even looked at yearly cost estimates to cover printer expenses such as ink cartridges and repairs.
Productivity
On average office employees spend 40% of their time looking for misplaced documents. Moving to a paperless system means documents are readily available at your employee’s fingertips. This means less time searching, less time making copies, and less time in transit which in turn makes your employees more time efficient and productive.
Security
Electronic documents have many security options. You can set access controls to restrict printing, sharing, editing, and who can view certain pieces of the documents. When going through an audit, you can see the document history of who made what changes to what documents and when.
Space
Moving your documents to a paperless system means you no longer need to store all those documents in your office. No more bulky filing cabinets taking up valuable office space. Freeing up some extra space could mean that you have more room to grow your business and bring on new talent.
Moving to a paperless system may sound like a big project, but in the long run, it will save your business money at every turn. There are many different systems you can incorporate into your business such as eFileCabinet and Buyerzone. Find a system that works best in your office structure and watch your team become more efficient and in turn have happier customers.
Still not sure if going paperless is for your business? Contact Heidi Adams with hla Bookkeeping today to find out exactly how much you could save by moving to a paperless system.