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The paperless office. It’s about more than being green. There are endless benefits to managing a paperless office successfully – and most of them reduce your stress level and show up tangibly in your bottom line.
Big business? According to IDC Report, an enterprise employing 1,000 workers wastes $48,000 per week, or nearly $2.5 million per year, simply due to an inability to locate and retrieve information.
Small business? According to the Datapro/Gartner Group, the average employee spends 400 hours a year searching for paper documents – for an employee who earns $60,000, that time lost costs the company a staggering $6,290.
What can you expect from going paperless?
PRODUCTIVITY
Prior to going paperless, my office was rampant with the endless “holy grail” type quest: everyone needing the same document at once and it nowhere to be found. This plagues law firms most heavily – personnel may spend hours searching files and folders, to the waste of the industry that charges by the hour.
A document management system with a good, secure cloud storage system behind it can guarantee that not only is your document searchable, but it can be viewed by more than one person at once. With Optical Character Recognition, or OCR software, the text that is scanned into the system can still be searched without being in the right format. Invoice numbers, case files, and key subjects can be revealed much more quickly than by rifling through a huge stack inside the dusty file cabinets that relied on your last intern’s humanity to organize them.
According to FastCompany Magazine, Executives waste 6 weeks per year searching for lost documents. How much is your time worth?
IMPROVED CUSTOMER RETENTION
Your clients are calling. They are paying bills, asking for information, tracking down case status, etc. What if you could answer their question, right when they call! Pulling up their case online simplifies and improves your client relations, turning their stress, anger and waiting time into a simple resolution.
It costs $120 in labor to track down a misplaced document or $250 in labor to recreate it – North Carolina’s Brunswick Beacon
SAVES TIME, AND THEREFORE MONEY
Not only is the time of employees wasted and therefore, costly, but storage itself costs money. Instead of paying for storage, have them scanned. Not only will you stop storing, but also faxing documents, and printing as well. How much can you save?
The document for a Boeing 747 weighs more than the plane itself (~735,000 lbs at takeoff), according to Office Systems Magazine. How much did that cost?
GOVERNMENT APPROVED SECURITY MEASURES
Paper documents can be stolen or destroyed – they are by no means a safe choice. Scanning documents means that you can apply restrictions to them, back them up to secured locations, and utilize systems for document management that have been approved for government contractors and HIPAA compliant offices.
Data accuracy and retrieval are critical. 100,000 The number of deaths each year caused by information errors or a lack of data, according to the Institute of Medicine. Will your company save lives with better document management?
ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS
Feeling green about not going green? Now is your chance to present an environmentally friendly face to your clients, employees and board. The community may respect your choice and the younger generation will be more impressed by your standards for your office.
“Of the total 8 hours wasted per week in paper document management, we spend 1 hour finding documents, 1 hour with difficulty in sharing documents, 1 hour in distribution/storage and .5 hours in arching and retrieval.” – Napo.net
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