Check out these convincing reasons to lessen your business’s paper consumption – plus trick on how you can get closer to a business free of paperwork.
The office life has come a long way since the times of old typewriters and fax machines. Many businesses handles their business with little more than a laptop, a smartphone and a printer. One thing is certain, to go paper free means much about increasing efficiency and maybe even more about saving the climate.
Do you know much paper that passes through your office every day? Do you send invoices, and receive bills via post? Do you have the habit of printing out important documents and archive them manually? Is your desk buried under letters, post and ad flyers? Do you print reports or presentations, and edit with a pen?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you are probably like so many others using more paper than necessary.
Big quantities of paper is produced unnecessarily every year. Unfortunately, many tress are cut down for this. When you also add the carbon footprint involved with the cutting, production and transportation of the finished product (not to talk about the effects of cutting down the forest), then every sheet of paper has a significant climate cost. To do your part in preserving the forests and fight climate changes is obviously a big advantage with decreasing or eliminating usage of paper in your business.
Here are six convincing reasons:
Forget about looking through piles of paper when your client calls you with a question, or handle the panic that comes from a wrongly placed sheet of paper. When your business is digital, you have instant access to everything. Accounting, project management and other software keeps track of communication and resources, so it’s actually hard to lose anything.
An individual sheet of paper can be cheap, but it’s accessories can cost a lot more. A printer of high quality, expensive ink cartridge and storage containers like filing cabinet can cost a fortune. If you still send invoices and pay bills via normal post, these have a postage cost, delivery cost, also a bit of your budget that is unnecessary.
Imagine an office without the unnecessary filing cabinets of steel, or filled boxes of paper stuck in the corners, basements or wardrobes. And how is it with the piles of paper on your desk? Why not clean up a bit, and free up some space for something beautiful, like a flower, or something useful, like a coffee machine.
In todays world, where 24/7 is the motto, you can’t afford saying to a client: “Sorry, the file is at the office.” Small business owners are known for their adaptable services. You have to be able to answer an e-mail, send a document or send an invoice whenever and wherever. If you trust in paper solutions, then that is simply not possible.
If your important documents are in the form of paper, then you will face huge problems if your office should be affected by fire, flooding, robbing or other similar scenarios. One of the foremost reasons many business owners turn to cloud based solutions is because of security reasons. Everything from accounting to projects and quotes can be encrypted for theft and regularly be backed up. This makes them practically impossible to destroy, and much more secure than its corresponding paper copies.
Do you print documents to proofread them? Paper copies require a lot of manual handling and also maintenance. Think about how much time you spend on transferring your changes on paper to an electronic file. If you keep on with the paper registers, archiving and searching for files can then take more time and mental energy than you think.
Today, laws and legislations are in the way of us going 100% paperless. But but making a few small changes, putting in the effort, you can get really close. Talenom can help you along the way to increased efficiency and happy entrepreneurship.