Benefits of Going Paperless

Part of Going Paperless Series which provides tips, tools, processes and resources to make the journey to a paperless office or home easier.

There are many benefits to going paperless. Bottom line it will save you time and money.

1. Far less physical space needed
2. Ability to centralize your document repository
3. Greater information security
4. Less liability from lost documents
5. Immense savings in time in searching tasks
6. Enhanced Collaboration

First, look at the Cost of Handling Paper to the right:

Cost of maintaining one 4drawer file cabinet:
$2,000 per year!

* Source 1

Let’s look at some of other statistics:

• Typical office workers spend 40% of their time looking for information.
• Professionals spend over:
• 500 hours annually reviewing and routing files
• 150 hours looking for incorrectly filed documents.
• The average document is copied 9 times  (Gartner).

As far as the Cost of Mishandling Paper, according to INC Magazine:

• It costs $20 to file a document,
• $120 to search for a misfiled document, and, if you can’t find it…
• It costs approximately $250 to recreate a lost document

Potential Challenges and Drawbacks

Converting your workplace into a paperless office will take some adjustment. Key things to remember when planning for this effort include:

1. Not everyone is a believer and will be on-board.
2. It will be a fundamental change in the way some folks work/think/research.
3. Many companies struggle with the initial cost of migrating to a paperless environment.

* Source 1: Statistics from http://www.totallypaperless.com/tp-documents/benefits_of_paperless.pdf – April 3, 2012