Startups do things digitally. But companies that have been around for decades largely don’t. It seems impossible to believe, but 82% of companies are still paper-based. 

“With all the lip service paid to innovation, it’s astounding that most businesses still use technology invented more than 2,000 years ago. We’ve entered the era of 3D printing, artificial intelligence, and missions to Mars — yet only 18 percent of companies consider themselves paperless.”

—Corp! Magazine

With cloud servers and apps like Monday, Trello, and Evernote replacing paper calendars, notebooks, and whiteboards, it seems crazy to think that less than 20% of all companies in 2020 operate digitally. Not so crazy, though, when you consider that computers weren’t even part of the office environment 40 years ago.

Let’s take a look at the brief history of paper to digital documentation and nail down when paper processes will finally go digital.

New employee: “I can’t find the printer and I need to print something.”

Coworker: “We don’t have one. And no you don’t.” 

Startups do things digitally. 

Invoices, receipts, and business cards are digital. Any paper that does come in—usually from the government—gets digitized and put in the cloud and that paper is recycled immediately. Post its and wall-hanging calendars are replaced by apps like Monday and Trello and Teamwork. Notebooks swap for task managers. Clutter disappears and productivity soars. 

Quick show of hands; who loves rifling through stacks of large-format documents?

No one? 

That is correct. No one likes sorting through piles of over-sized documents.

That's why digitizing paper documents has been a priority in the business world for the last 20-30 years. Digital documents make work life easier and more efficient. And when productivity soars, so do profits. 

Here are some of the reasons why you need to get on the digitization bandwagon today:

The world spent the last 20 to 30 years or so going paperless. Digitization of paper files and easy-to-use document management systems paved the way for enterprise-wide, industry-wide acceptance of digitization. Even Doris, a stickler for alphabetized stickers, reinforced shelving, and file cabinets that weighed more than smart cars saw the benefit of searchable, shareable digital documents—which are many. 

Document scanning turns paper files into digital documents. Document management is a system that tracks digitized documents, ensuring accountability, transparency, organization, knowledge retention, shareability, and productivity.

Nearly 30% of American companies believe they must go digital to survive. Nearly 90% believe they must do so to remain competitive. But many companies don't have in-house resources to handle digitization themselves. That's where third-party experts come in. Read on to learn how a digitization company can help you right now. 

Cost-efficiency and productivity are vital to every business's bottom line. If your employees are spending precious time searching for documents in disorganized binders and file cabinets, you're losing out on efficiency and money. 

Past practices of keeping large format documents in a hard copy form are quickly going the way of the dodo. In an increasingly digital world, it's getting harder to justify boxes of file folders that take up so much space they need their own storage facility to protect. 

The times are a-changing, and they're changing fast. What used to be standard business practices, like filing all your documents, are now considered wasteful compared to their modern alternatives.

Organizations lose out on 21.3% of their productivity due to problems related to document management.