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.
- Far less physical space needed
- Ability to centralize your document repository
- Greater information security
- Less liability from lost documents
- Immense savings in time in searching tasks
- 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:
- Not everyone is a believer and will be on-board.
- It will be a fundamental change in the way some folks work/think/research.
- 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
