In an effort to become more sustainable, many organizations are choosing to eliminate paper completely from their processes, choosing to implement paperless office solutions.
Why should businesses care about becoming more sustainable? Beyond saving money and a moral victory, more consumers and businesses want to buy from companies that show care for the environment. In fact, 87% of CEOs believe that sustainability is important for profits and 73% of Americans would stop purchasing from companies who don’t care about the environment.
Eliminating paper is one major step a business can take to become more sustainable, save money, and improve production.
The Costs of Using Paper in Business
Leaning heavily on paper-based processes brings high costs with it.
An average business’ paper consumption rises 22% each year
The average employee costs $725 a year because of printing habits, made even more expensive by the fact that paper consumption and cost are going up. Not to mention the time commitment to maintaining a fleet of printers, copiers, and fax machines, as well as the spatial limitations of rows of filing cabinets to store it all.
The benefits of going paperless seemingly go on and on, including:
- Cleaning up clutter around the office
- Reducing the need for physical storage
- Eliminating paper and associated costs (ink, machines, repairs, maintenance, etc.)
- Making documents and information more accessible
- Streamlining processes
- Improved customer experience
Paperless Office Solutions for Modern Businesses
To counteract the deficits and take advantage of the benefits, businesses are turning to more digital processes, removing paper from the equation entirely to save paper both in the office and in their wallets.
Here are a few of the main ways that businesses can become more digitized and use paperless office solutions to become more sustainable.
Digital Forms and Documents
The first main step toward a paperless business is taking physical documents and moving them into the digital world, typically a cloud system, that acts as your new filing cabinet. Now, instead of hunting down a sheet of paper or binder, all documents are stored on one site or company intranet to be easily accessed.
As stated above, doing this brings many benefits including savings on printing supplies and equipment, reduced need for physical storage, more accessible documents, and more streamlined processes using digital forms and contracts that makes business easier and faster.
Cloud-Based Document Management
One of the biggest benefits of cloud storage solutions for managing documents is the immediate availability of those documents organization-wide. Rather than confining important information and documents onto a hard drive, using the cloud makes it easier than ever to find, share, and use critical business information.
This means faster access to information that people need to complete sales, perform customer service tasks, and do research, increasing productivity and removing the difficulties of having to seek out information. Instead, it’s all right there, available to those who need it.
Cloud storage also has cybersecurity benefits as data centers have higher security standards than most businesses and regularly update and test them to ensure the safety of the information stored there. Using the cloud also lets businesses control who has access to what information, helping them keep documents from reaching the wrong hands.
Related: Data Center Tiers: What Are They and Why Do They Matter?
Digitize Paper-Based Processes
When going digital with your documents, you can also implement some other technologies to help streamline processes that used to be confined to being paper-based. Older, manual processes that took a long time and wasted hours of worker time can now be done by robots, leaving people to focus on more productive projects.
Automation can help optimize many different processes that used to rely heavily on paper, such as:
- Data entry and management
- Accounts payable (invoice processing, billing, etc.)
- Customer service communication
- Reporting
- Onboarding
- Sales and contracts
- Ordering and expense tracking
Related: How Automation Can Make Your Business Eco-Friendly
In Conclusion
Using a combination of unique paperless office solutions, businesses can truly remove paper from the equation, becoming more sustainable and saving money along the way.
Learn more about how Impact’s services and solutions can help your business become more sustainable. How do we know it works? Because we did it ourselves. Take a look at our own case study to see how Impact went completely paperless using innovative technology solutions.
