Going paperless is a burgeoning trend in offices throughout the world. If you have considered going paperless, but aren't sure if it's worth the investment, then you should consider the following seven advantages of a paperless office:
You will immediately start saving
One of the greatest advantages of a paperless office is its cost effectiveness. Although a single sheet of paper seems cheap, your paper costs will add up quickly. The average office worker uses over 10,000 pieces of paper per year. In addition, maintaining paper records requires additional expenses, including storage space and even additional employees.
In a paperless office, the documents that you create don't cost any more than the electricity that you used to produce them.
You won't lose documents
Even with the most organized of filing systems, it is still easy for paper documents to get mixed up, lost or even accidentally destroyed. A paperless office won't have this problem, especially if start using an intelligent document management system, which will automatically index your documents for you, and make them easy to find with a simple search engine inquiry.
You can better serve your customers
When you are serving a customer, it helps to be able to access data relevant to your conversation. Even if you have the information you need in a paper office, chances are that a customer won't want to wait around for you to dig up a file every time they have a question or objection. The instant accessibility of digital documents gives you a huge advantage in these situations.
Your entire office will be more efficient
The management of physical documents wastes a lot of time. Every single time an employee takes the time to file a document, search for a piece of paper or destroy a physical record, he or she is wasting time. Each instance will waste anywhere from a few minutes to several hours. One of the biggest advantages of a paperless office is that all of these tasks can be completed in only a few seconds with the click of a button.
You will save space
As you create new paper documents, you start to wonder where it will all go. As the paper starts piling up, your office will start to feel smaller and more cluttered. You completely avoid this in a paperless office, because all of your data is stored either on a small storage device, or on a remote cloud server.
Your company will instantly become greener
Going green is a mandate both to help the environment and to make your company more attractive to customers. When you stop using paper in the office, your business becomes exponentially greener, because the deforestation required to produce paper is a top contributor to carbon emissions and environmental destruction.
Your data will be more secure
Stealing paper data is as easy as bending over and picking it up. Even paper records kept under lock and key are easy to steal for anyone with a desire to access them. Paperless records aren't so easy to get into once you secure them. A secured paperless record will be scrambled, and only readable once the proper authentication information has been entered. This means that even if someone steals your storage device, they still won't be able to access the information inside.
The time to have a paperless office is right now
The advantages of having a paperless office cannot be ignored. By using less paper in your office, you are enhancing your company's ability to succeed in both the short and long-term.