Try wrapping your head around this simple question. Since we live and work in a digital age, why would we/should we be overwhelmed with paper? Indeed, why would you even have a file cabinet in your office? Why do we still use the phrase “paper trail?”
You Don’t Trust Your Computer
Perhaps you just don’t trust the ability of your computer or your company’s servers to store volumes of information and documents that you’re convinced you’re going to have to reference again and again (and seldom do). I get it. I was not born in the digital age. I grew up with the typewriter, white out, carbon paper, and lots of file cabinets at home and in the various offices where I worked over the course of a long career.
Your Filing System is Foolproof
But here’s another question. If you can’t find a paper document because it’s not where you thought (you were absolutely sure) you filed it, can you ask your file cabinet to find it for you based on a key word in the title of the document? Of course, not. That’s silly. But you can ask your computer. You can just out go to your shared drive (the one that gets automatically saved to your company’s servers every night) or SharePoint and type a keyword or two, and the document will come up and you’ll suddenly realize that you saved “ABC Partnership Contract” under “C” for contracts and not under “A” for ABC Company.
Time to Get Hip and Go Paperless
YUP. This is your moment. This is your time to embark on a paperless journey. And if your current accounting or ERP or CRM system doesn’t offer a paperless solution, it’s time to move up to . Here at Altico Advisors, we thank our lucky stars every day for . They’ll take your Microsoft Dynamics GP and your system paperless. We often think of going paperless as a way to save time and money. But it also saves space! The space occupied by all of those file cabinets in your office, your hallways, your storage units. Get rid of those! Honest. You won’t need them anymore.
If you’re an Accountant, You’ll Want to Calculate the ROI, Right?
No problem. Take a look at what PaperSave offers you. First, they present the facts and figures*:
- It costs companies $20 in labor to file a document, $120 to find a misfiled document and $220 to reproduce a lost document
- It costs $25,000 to fill a 4 drawer lateral filing cabinet
- It costs over $2,300 a year to maintain that same cabinet
- Professionals spend 20-30% of their day filing, searching for, and retrieving information but only 5-15% of that time reading the document
- The average document is copied 19 times in its life
- The costs of office space has increased by 19%
- The average time it takes to fax a document is 8 minutes
- A single fax machine costs $6,200 per year to operate
- The average costs to send a package between locations is $8 to $15
- Documents are growing at a rate of 22% per year!
Staggering right? And as if that wasn’t enough, . It’s digital, of course. You won’t need that old adding machine that used to adorn your desk in all its immense glory. No kidding. My mother still uses one of those!! But my advice to you is: Don’t be like my mother!!!
*Sources: Coopers&Lybrand (now PriceWaterhouseCoopers), Captaris and Gartner Group
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by Marcia Nita Doron, Altico Advisors, Microsoft Dynamics ERP and CRM Partner serving New Hampshire (NH) and beyond.
