A paperless office is an office set up in which the use of paper is reduced or even eliminated completely by converting documents and other papers into digital form. Even without doing research, benefits of paperless office is obvious to everybody:
- It saves space
- If applied right it also saves money (according to United States Environmental Protection Agency average office worker generates approximately two pounds of paper and paperboard products each day)
- Makes documents and other information shared, accessed, synced and searched easily
- Keeps important information more secure
- Data can be backed up automatically
- Most obviously helps the environment
From a business perspective we would like to pay special attention to the last point. You might not know this, but going green can help you attract more customers. Report from 2014 says that 55% of consumers from 60 different countries would pay higher prices for goods from environmentally conscious companies. Impressed? Well, a year later this research was repeated and numbers went to 72%, and have kept growing ever since. So going green is a smart business strategy, and one of the ways is go paperless and announce this to your clients.
If you like the benefits, which come with having a paperless office, we prepared three simple tips for you to get started:
- Make it less convenient to print by reducing the amount of printers and instead make it easier to share documents electronically. By using clouds and/or storing your documents on internal servers you will also increase security of your documents, speed of exchanging and finding documents, allow people to work on same documents collaboratively and all together will enjoy what technology has to offer instead of old-fashioned paperwork.
- Request paperless statements from banks, suppliers and service providers. Having electronic copies rather than paper versions will make it quicker and more reliable. You can also organize your bills better, access old statements for internal reports. Try to pay bills online too, as this faster, more reliable and helps the environment.
- Make sure your website does everything your clients need for interaction with your company. Need information from them? Let them fill it out online at their own pace. Need to accept paymenst? Enable ecommerce. Need to provide information and updates to your clients? Post news on your website and allow your customers to subscribe to email newsletter and promotions.
If you are interested in helping environment and making your business more successful by doing so, give our team a call for a free consultation about how going green can help your business at 705-475-0323