In more than one way, a paperless office indicates how savvy the business owner is. Today many businesses are choosing to do away with paper documents in favor of digital ones. It is a quickly accelerating trend due to the efficiency, security, and accessibility that come with digital document management solutions.
If you still depend on paper documents in your business, here are 10 great reasons why you should consider going paperless.
- Be Eco-Friendly:
An estimated 2,500 trees are cut down to make 10 million pages and the average office worker in the U.S. prints about 10,000 pages every year. In the US, about 85 million tons of paper become waste every year. More than 400 million ink cartridges end up in landfills annually, as do about 100 million toner cartridges. Going paperless allows you to make an immense contribution to protecting the Earth and fulfilling your business’s green objectives. Plus, clients who take their environmental responsibilities seriously will appreciate your eco-friendly practices. - Save Space:
Safely storing paper documents requires several bulky file cabinets in your office. Switching to a digital solution allows you to free up valuable floor space where you can set up essential equipment, make room for more employees, or maybe set up a new foosball or ping-pong table. - Manage Data More Easily:
Using a digital data management solution means that going paperless is not only aesthetically appealing, but also more practical. Businesses often need to safeguard immense amounts of data, and when this data is stored in paper files, retrieval is an enormous challenge no matter how efficient the filing system is. Going digital gives you the advantage of locating and accessing data instantly. This significantly improves your operational efficiency and employee productivity, since people don’t waste time searching endlessly for each piece of data they need. - Secure Your Data:
Paper files may get lost, copied, folded, removed from the office or simply misplaced. When any of these situations arises, sensitive information is at risk. Go digital and you can safeguard all your data with top-notch security, allowing you to track who is accessing which files. You could even limit access to different data sets to specific employee groups, thus ensuring complete control over data flow throughout the organization. - Reduce Costs:
For any business to embrace a change, the change must positively impact the bottom line. Just imagine the kind of expense represented by the 10,000 pages the average worker prints every year. In addition, you have the cost of ink and toner and the cost of maintaining printers. Going paperless allows your business to cut costs on equipment like printers and copiers as well as office supplies like paper, ink, toner, paperclips, pins, folders and much more. Becoming a zero-paper office can mean big savings for your business. - Respond Faster:
According to a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers report, 5 to 15% of professionals’ time is spent reading information, but a whopping 50% of their time may go into looking for it. Since accessing data is faster and more accurate when your data is stored digitally, your response time to customer queries and business needs is reduced dramatically. If you are using a data Cloud, the ability to access data from different locations cuts down the time taken for communication and data transfer. This is also valuable during disaster management. In the event that your business premises are inaccessible or unusable, perhaps due to a bad storm or a power outage, business need not come to a standstill, since all of your critical data is still available from remote locations. - Back Up Documents Automatically:
A comprehensive data-management solution encompasses periodic, automatic backup of all your stored data. In the unfortunate event that your business is exposed to a malicious virus or a systems failure, you can switch to the backup to seamlessly restore order. This also eliminates the need for you to keep track of backups, so you can safeguard your critical data at all times. - Be Professional:
The marketplace is immensely competitive today and a business that comes across as being a completely professional and tech-savvy stands the best chance of succeeding. Your clients are not likely to be impressed if you carry around critical information in paper files that can easily be lost or stolen. Digital-data management gives your business a more professional appearance and indicates to your potential clients that you embrace business technology. - Swiftly Edit, Review, and Change Digital Files:
Digital files are not only easier to access and transfer but also lend themselves beautifully to edits, changeovers, and reviews. Have your clients review your digital documents immediately, make changes where necessary, and complete the communication process in a matter of minutes over the table or online. There is no need to go back to your office to get a corrected version of the document. - Integrate with Other Business Applications:
One of the greatest conveniences of digital data is that you can integrate it with other business applications instantly and easily. For instance, you can talk over the terms of a deal, draw up a contract, make changes requested by your client, and email the contract to him right away all in a single sitting. Or create a product for your client, integrate it into a presentation, or put it up on your website directly.
Whether you look at it from a social, environmental, financial, or practical perspective, you will find numerous benefits to going paperless with your business. You might even say that digital data paves the way for better and more efficient business overall.