Have you considered sending an email or text invoice to customers instead of a printed copy? Or spent hours looking for an important document in filing cabinets? Despite the prevalence of electronic documents, many businesses still rely on paper. If you’re a business owner seeking efficient ways to optimize operations, cut costs, and save time, creating a paperless office should be a top priority.

What is a Paperless Office?

A paperless office is a work environment that primarily uses digital documents and minimizes paper usage. Paperless employees are individuals who reduce or eliminate using paper in the office. This practice is not only a great way to embrace digitization but also save the environment. All you have to do is convert paper files and documents into electronic ones and manage them digitally.

Benefits of Going Paperless

Going paperless boosts transparency in a business’s daily operation, not to mention all the storage room you’ll have in your cabinets. Moreover, technological advances now allow offices to easily digitize and store files using cloud database, invoice, and management platforms that are secure, easy to maintain, and instantly accessible from any location worldwide.

However, transitioning to a paperless office isn’t an overnight process. This change takes time and effort. But if you put in the effort and gradually eliminate paper usage at the workplace, the change can be well worth the effort.

Here are 7 reasons why going paperless is a smart business move:

1. Save Money and Space

The average office employee uses over 10,000 pieces of paper annually. Imagine how much you’ll save even if one employee goes paperless. Businesses also reduce expenditure on other activities that involve paper, including printing, faxing, and buying office stationery and equipment. Moreover, you will greatly reduce your office’s storage requirement, especially shelf space.

2. Reduce Clutter

Nobody likes clutter, especially in the workplace. By creating a paperless office, you alleviate some of the paper file messiness. Digital files don’t take any room apart from the servers or computers they’re stored in. With no physical documents in sight, workstations look cleaner and more organized.

In a cluttered workspace, there are usually pieces of paper that belong in the trash mixed with those that need to be filed and stored. Employees waste precious time figuring out which paper belongs when de-cluttering.

3. Have Access to Everything At Your Fingertips

With paperless business systems, you avoid wasting time sorting through paperwork to find the right document. Using a cloud-based filing system, you can access data from any device as long as you have an internet connection. You can even send digital receipts to customers via email or text message following the purchase.

4. Improve Remote Working

In the COVID-19 era, one of the biggest challenges businesses faced was accessing important documents during the lockdown. With online documents, employees are less tied to the workplace and can easily work while maintaining productivity remotely. A paperless office allows you to do your tasks on the go or while taking care of some chores using mobile devices that allow you to exchange and effortlessly back up data.

5. Disaster-Proof Your Documents

Unpredictable events such as earthquakes and fires can wipe out important documents instantly. If you lose a paper document, there’s no getting it back. Having duplicates helps but still but doesn’t mitigate the risk completely. On the other hand, you can store digital files on encrypted servers with multiple backup points to ensure you don’t lose them in the event of a disaster.

Plus, these platforms can also track who accesses each document and the changes they make, so you can easily trace security-breaches.

6. Protecting the Environment

Since paper comes from processed wood, creating a paperless office translates to saving more trees. Besides, going paperless also means less energy consumption at your workplace since you’ll not use printers, scanners, or fax machines.

7. More Data Security

We live in a digital age where network security and data privacy are two of the biggest challenges for companies. With this in mind, you should consider what is more secure – paper or electronic files? Electronic files are vulnerable to cybersecurity threats, and paper documents are subject to many more threats.

While you can invest in network security and backup services to keep your digital files secure, you can’t bring back paper documents you lost in a fire, by flooding, or just by old age.

Tips for Creating a Paperless Office

If you found these benefits appealing, the following are 5 great tips to create a paperless office:

1. Provide Tools and Training to Staff

You cannot assume that your staff will minimize their paper usage themselves. You must provide clear instructions and written guidelines to transition into going paperless.

2. Make Working Without Paper Easier

Going paperless should be an easy process and must deliver tangible benefits to motivate everyone. These benefits should save time and effort. For example, if you don’t want employees to rely on copying and scanning documents, allow them to use cloud storage and file management platforms.

3. Switch from Cabinets to Digital Storage

Improve your storage capacity and backup systems, so your staff doesn’t need paper documents. With fewer paper documents, you can easily switch completely to digital storage.

4. Switch to Laptops and Tablets

You must be wondering how this can help you go paperless. Employees that primarily use desktop computers cannot bring their devices into company meetings or presentations, meaning they have to prints. With laptops and other mobile devices, they can easily connect to projectors to publicly access the document.

5. Remove Printers and Copiers

As long employees have a printer on their workstations, they will continue to use them. But if you replace them with centralized network printers, you can limit their use.

Wrapping Up

If you’d like to learn more about emerging technologies and trending business practices, visit Percento Technologies today. We also provide network security and backup services if you’re planning to create a paperless office. So, feel free to get in touch with our team anytime.