It might come as a surprise to some of you, but going paperless is something that every business benefits from. We’re aware that eliminating paper is an unrealistic task for many businesses. But reducing the amount of paper your business uses does have its economic benefits. So, let’s talk about that.
Better Document Organization
Companies struggle with document organization. It is estimated that employees spend 1.8 hours a day looking for information. And since most information is in paper format, it makes the problem that much worse. Documents get lost all the time. The number of hours you spent looking for it can be put towards achieving other tasks.
So businesses can reduce the hour’s employees spent searching for documents on something else – making the employee more productive itself. If you’re just getting started, choose from the best document scanning apps available.
Better Client Communication
What better way to communicate with clients than through email? Email emerges as the best form of business communication. It replaces traditional letter communication as a more effective and financial solution. If you depend on paper as a form of communicating with your clients, then you’re doing something wrong.
The easiest way to cut paper usage is to switch to email when it comes to client communication. This eliminates needing to buy paper, print the document, and pay for postage.
Better Information Management
Printing documents not only increases the chances of the document getting lost, but you have to carry it with you to important meetings. While this is one area where paper does indeed presents itself as useful, it isn’t workable in the long run.
Big companies are moving away from paper and instead use tablets for meetings. All the information is on the tablet, and you can reuse it. By this, we mean to update the tablet with new information and documents when the next meeting comes. What this does is keep information tidy. You don’t have to divide office space to keep documents, you can do it on the cloud or on a server.
Every time you need to access a particular document, open it on your laptop, tablet, smartphone, or office PC. The ability to open any document anywhere at any time makes going paperless an attractive proposition for millions of businesses. Startups are especially fond of the idea. Better information management by going paperless might even help you survive the first year.
Automatic Backups
What happens if an important document gets lost? Do you have a backup copy of it? If not, then you’re in trouble. Let’s not beat around the bush; documents get lost all the time. This costs businesses a lot of money. Why go through all that when you can cut paper and not worry about losing documents ever again?
By keeping everything digital, businesses keep automatic backups of their documents. By keeping a copy of the document on the server, businesses cut the risk of losing important documents. What’s even more important is that every device that opens the document also makes a copy.
So even if your server somehow fails, you will keep a copy on many devices. The ability to make automatic backups of important documents is yet another reason why businesses should go paperless. All that this does is benefit the business.
Better Security
Businesses spend a lot of money on security. This is the only cost that comes with going paperless. But even that has its financial benefits. Customers will only do business with companies that can protect their data. Privacy and data protection are two things that matter a lot to customers. Even if most of them have no idea what that means, they still worry about it.
You have to do your part and make sure to protect customer data and privacy. You can’t protect the filing cabinet in your office. But what you can do is get bank-level security for your cloud accounting system. Cloud services are aware that security breaches are likely. After all, more than 1,500 US businesses are targets of cyberattacks each year.
So the need to offer businesses bank-level information protection comes as a basic service. By going with a cloud system for information management instead of a paper form, you’re benefiting in more than one way. And at the end of the day, you’re benefiting more than just financially.
