Paperless

Benefits Of Transforming Into A Paper-free Office

March 25, 2022

Going paperless at your office by digitalizing your documentation is a huge step.

Although it’s not easy for many businesses to transfer the entirety of their paperwork electronically, you can start small and shift slowly. It involves numerous benefits, such as lower costs and higher efficiency after digitalization.

In a competitive market, cutting down on expenses and enhancing productivity is an arduous task. You can accomplish these tasks easily by going paperless.

The availability of advanced technological tools is making it easy to move your documentation online. If you are still confused about going paperless at your office, consider these benefits.

Better organization
Tracking and maintaining papers manually is a time-consuming task. Your employees may find it intimidating to handle all clutter and mess when it comes to documents. This becomes even tougher when you are running a large-scale operation. Paper documents increase the risk of huge errors and blunders.

Going paperless will streamline your management and organizing tasks so your employees can channel concentration towards high-priority tasks. This avoids tedious paper hunts. You will face a lower chance of human errors and mistakes by introducing coherence and proficiency in the workplace.

Transfer information easily
Numerous available tools enable you to generate digital invoices and quotations. Hence, your employees can instantly share relevant details without incurring printing and postage expenses.

Marketing and accounting teams can communicate information in realtime and make adjustments according to their clients’ needs. Employees can easily search through old documents with a few clicks. They can arrange documents by date, clients, serial number, and nature of documents.

Enhance security
Even though cyber-attacks are frequent, digital documents have become more secure. Electronic records are easier to render through encryption.

You can control access to specific documents and manage security levels. Printed documents require a lot of space, and controlling access is not possible. Documents are also prone to fire and water damage. You can double up digital efforts with backups and cybersecurity.

Lower costs
When you transform documents digitally, you improve the process’s efficiency and lower expenses.

Digital transformation offers you to store a large volume of paperwork, saving a lot of storage space. Moreover, digitalization will reduce the cost of ink, printers, paper, employee time, and space to store the documents.

The most important benefit of going digital with your paperwork is that you save employee time. They can perform additional tasks instead of storing, managing, and searching for documents.

Five Ways To Take Your Business Paper Free

December 1, 2017

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

If you’re a small business owner, chances are you always have one eyes on your operating costs and the best way to reduce or eliminate extra expenses and improve staff efficiency.

One great way in which you can gain some great cost savings is by eliminating paper.

Paper-based tasks increase storage, postage, and compliance costs and can be a major overhead for modern-day businesses.

Here are five ways you can reduce paper usage and save yourself some cash in the process.

Smart Project Management

Traditionally, the process of managing company projects that involve different departments and multiple people generates massive amounts of paperwork.

More contemporary organizations are taking the smart project management approach through the use of cloud-based solutions, such as Basecamp, Asana or Trello, which allow you to ditch the paper while running a project online with unlimited users.

Electronic Payroll

Rectifying payroll issues costs half of all small business an average of $850 annually. Using decent payroll software reduces the errors and facilitates paperless processing. An electronic payroll system automates all the manual calculations such as tracking hours worked, calculating salaries, and filing taxes.

Salaries can also be paid electronically rather than printing checks or visiting the bank.

The additional benefits of electronic payroll include self-service functionality, and allowing staff to view their payroll data, such as personal details, tax deductions and pay slips online from any device.

Receipts and Invoices

Eliminate paper (and postage costs) by offering customers the option to receive electronic receipts either by email or text.

Your customer will then have it for future reference. Ask suppliers to issue and email digital invoices, which you can save into your accounting software.

Cloud Storage

Small businesses spend a lot of money to purchase, fill and maintain filing cabinets!

Switching to cloud storage can reduce most of this cost as many services, like Dropbox, offer a free allowance.

Most cloud-based options also allow you to organize documents into separate folders.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

CRM software can reduce the extent to which you rely on paper to store and track customer details, purchase orders, quotes and other correspondence.

Features include the ability to store customer data and interactions, manage staff details and vendors, and store documents.

Benefits Of Going Paperless

August 22, 2014

Michael Menor is Vice President of Support Services for Tech Experts.

The “paperless office” has been a concept in American business culture since 1979, when it was first coined in Newsweek. As the technology improves and becomes more cost effective for small businesses, the paperless office is becoming a reality for more and more small companies. If you are considering going paperless or adopting a document management system, consider these five benefits.

Increased Productivity
Call it a variant of Murphy’s Law — when you need a paper file, it is inevitably located at the bottom of a large stack of files on the floor in the corner of somebody’s office.

For example, law firm personnel can spend literally hours every year looking for paper files. In an industry that typically charges by the hour, that’s not a productive use of time.

By contrast, you can immediately retrieve a scanned file from your document management system. With a document management system, multiple people can retrieve a given document at the same time, improving efficiency.

When you scan a document, you get an image of that file. To convert the image of the text into searchable text, you can use optical character recognition (OCR ) software — often included with a scanner.

Once you’ve made scanned files searchable, it becomes even easier to find them because you can search for any phrase in the document, such as a client name, not just the name of the document itself. This makes it incredibly easy to find invoice numbers or any other information that is usually hidden deep within a document.

Improved Customer Service
At one time or another, everyone has been on the receiving end of the dreaded phrase “I’ll have to check the documents and get back to you.” Consider how much happier your customers would be if you could say, “Let me pull up the document now and check for you,” resolving their question during a single phone call?

As an added bonus, the ability to search documents makes it less likely that you’ll overlook that key piece of information. More efficient service means happier clients who pay their bills faster.

Even better, improving your client relations will make your clients more likely to hire your firm for other services and make it easier for them to refer your business!

Reduce Operating Costs
Storage costs represent a major expense. Typically, office space is second only to salaries in terms of cost, especially in large cities. As the piles of paper grow, so do your storage costs.

Scanning documents can substantially reduce storage costs by eliminating a significant portion of your paper files and the storage space required to store them. You can then put the space once used for storage to more productive use.

Before you call a shredding company, read your state rules on the retention of physical files, especially in practice areas such as Real Estate or Financial Services.

Even if you have to keep the files for a specified period of time, scanning them will enable you to store them off-site as cheaply as possible. Scanning documents also reduces time spent requesting documents from the file room or even warehouse.

Finally, since you can easily email scanned documents, you can reduce your phone bill by faxing documents less often. Some paperless law firms have even eliminated their fax machines entirely and switched to online fax services.

With a paperless office, you can almost entirely eliminate the costs of printing, such as copy paper, ink and toner. With toner being one of the most expensive liquids on the planet, this can equal huge cost savings for your small business.

Better Security
Paper documents are subject to two risks — physical theft and destruction from a variety of disasters (fire, flood, etc.). When you scan confidential documents, you can restrict access to your eyes only. For example, you can limit the access of sensitive information or specific case files to select people.

Law firms subject to federal and state regulations regarding the protection of client information will find compliance significantly easier with scanned documents. Also, replacing a digital file is much easier than trying to replace a file cabinet destroyed by fire or flood.

Environmentally Sound
If environmental issues are important to you and your business or you have clientele that care about these issues, going paperless can boost your status in the community.
For example, digitization of your files will result in fewer photocopies, reducing company paper consumption.

The less we use today means the more we leave behind for future generations. If you are part of the Green Revolution, making your business paperless is a great place to start.

Going paperless will save your firm time and money – but be wary of anyone selling you a magic software product that will fix all your problems. Like anything else, you get out of it what you put into it.

There are many organizations that can help with this type of solution, but make sure their company culture matches you own. After all, the last thing you want is to try and go paperless with the help of Xerox or any copier company whose main interest is in hardware and consumables.

(Image Source: iCLIPART)