Moving Offices? Get An Electronic Filing System First
Moving offices? Congratulations! Your business is likely growing, and you probably need more office space to continue growing your team and its departments, but that’ll be difficult to do without a top-rated electronic filing system.
Although you’ll have to move more resources from one space to another than you probably ever did as a child when you and your parents moved, there’s a way to make moving offices significantly easier than residential moving: Better yet, it will improve your operations and reduce administrative costs long after the move has been completed.
Why the Electronic Filing System is Your New Mover
All you have to do is go paperless through an electronic filing system prior to moving offices.
If you ever moved houses at any point in your life, you know you couldn’t digitize all the items in your room and load them into the U-Haul, but luckily for you the office is a bit different. Digitizing all your documents through an electronic filing system before moving offices will reduce the amount of heavy lifting you’ll need to do by thousands of pounds. So unless you’re training for some kind of strongman competition, going paperless before moving offices is a good idea.
Although CPA Patrick Ballard didn’t move offices, he did get to go paperless and throw away 25 filing cabinets after digitizing all his documents with eFileCabinet. Ballard, who runs a CPA firm with a small number of employees, freed up significant space in his office and drastically scaled back on office clutter by doing this.
Once you’ve gone paperless before moving, you also won’t run any risks of breaking or altering information while moving it – with the right electronic filing system, you’ll have all your files backed up in SSAE 16-certified data centers and fully recouped in the event of a natural disaster. So, with the right technology, accidentally dropping something while switching offices is no longer cause for concern.
What’s more, once you’ve gone paperless, you’ll be able to throw out those bulky filing cabinets and scale back on office junk so much that even for a company growing in size, you could move into a smaller office than your business’s current residence, and cut costs on commercial real estate with an electronic filing system.
Why Failure to Take Your Office Paperless is Cause for Concern
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the paperless office is on its way, and for good reason: More and more small to mid-sized businesses are using various methods to go paperless. Christopher Mims, who wrote the Wall Street Journal article, notes that America’s office workers use or waste one trillion pieces of office paper each year.
Mims also notes in the article that you’d have to climb Mount Everest 18,000 times to climb to the top of the stack of paper produced in offices worldwide each year.
The consumer and business owner partakes in overthrowing this process by deciding with whom and when they will go paperless. Yes, however cliché it may seem, if you want your business to grow year-over-year, it’s not a matter of if you go paperless, it’s a matter of when. You can partake in this process by selecting when, and how they will go paperless – and choosing to do so right before moving offices is a wise decision.
However, if you’d like to go paperless through a phased implementation, it may be better to wait until you have fully moved offices. Otherwise, hire a couple temporary employees to scan documents, and they’ll be uploaded to the electronic filing system in no time.