When organizations fail to adopt a well-planned office filing system it interferes with productivity while increasing security risks. Organization is key to document security and access but often falls by the wayside as systems expand to include conflicting technology. However, when you have a well-planned digital office filing system, storage remains scalable, secure and convenient improving productivity.

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. 

At the start of a business, manual document filing can be quick easy and necessary. However, as your business grows manual filing can become a very cumbersome practice. In a busy business world it is important that you can file, find, and store documents in a quick and effective way. There are more efficient ways in today’s growing technological world that can help keep your organized with a higher productivity level. Here are some disadvantages of manual document filing processes.