05 Jan Paper, Paper Everywhere and Not a Clue What To Do With It
Oh the woes of an office. All the paper. Bills, employee records, sales slips, credit card receipts, audit reports, bank statements, insurance policies. You get the idea. Over the years paper just seems to pile and pile. If keeping all the paper organized and manageable is a nightmare, then remembering what documents you can toss and what you need to save is Freddy Kreuger chasing you with those shredder like fingers. The fact is that all businesses have a paper problem. Buying, storing and destroying the paper is also an ecological problem. The paper cuts, bad back from lifting the boxes of paper and nightmare of dealing with the paper is a health hazard. So what do you do? You can’t just do away with paper, can you? A paperless world just isn’t real yet, and who wants to spend all that time scanning anyway, right? Besides where would you store all that data? You would need a super computer or a huge server wouldn’t you? Digital data storage is for big companies, isn’t it?
So here is the truth. Digital file storage is for companies of every size and is a huge ecological and financial savings. The best news is that digital file storage is a time saver of epic measure. The debate rages on among office managers and owners everywhere but I swear digitizing your documents in the big picture is a time and money saver, and you shouldn’t listen to that neigh-sayer who clearly has a phobia about change.
Consider this: How much paper do you buy a year? How much of that could you save if your suppliers sent you digital bills in your email that you didn’t need to print that you could just save as digital documents? How many boxes of documents does your business have sitting in storage right now? How positive are you that under no circumstance would it ever be destroyed, stolen, or lost? How much time or money do you invest annually in moving that paper around, filing the paper, then moving the filed paper to boxes for storage? How much do you then invest to have the paper later sorted and destroyed? Can you Google search your paper documents in the file cabinet to find something that was misfiled?
The downside to digital filing of office documents in the past has been time, scanner cost and quality, and data storage space. Those are concerns of the past. Time to scan with a good scanner and document software is very minimal. Scanners are now faster than ever, scan two sides at a time and have better feed mechanisms that prevent pages from sticking together. A good scanner and Adobe program can run you reasonable money. Data storage space in the cloud is more secure than ever, costs little to no money and frees up your hardware for other things. Not to mention that if it is in the could when your computer dies, is stolen or isn’t around you can still access all that important data and records.
So why doesn’t everyone use a digital system. Well that answer is simple. People are afraid of what they don’t know and aren’t familiar with. The start of a new year is your opportunity to make it happen. Why not take the plunge now and start saving your money and the planet with some digital file storage?
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