You may have heard others talking about a paperless office and wondered why it was important. Well, there are several reasons you may choose to go paperless. Here are some of them:
For the environment
Obviously, the use of paper, toner and the electricity to run your printer all have a certain environmental impact. Eliminating, or lessening the amount of printing you do, will reduce the impact on the environment. You probably won’t be able to get away from using paper totally, and even if you do, you’ll need to run a scanner. You won’t eliminate your environmental footprint, but every bit helps and going paperless as much as possible will make a difference.
To reduce storage needs
A paperless office means you don’t need filing cabinets. That’s a lot of floorspace that can be used in another way. Even if it’s just empty space – that will make your office feel more open and spacious. It also means you won’t need to spend money on suspension files, folders, labels, as well as having space to store spares and printer toner.
To make it easier to share
Generally, when you share a document these days it’s via email. So, it makes sense that having the document stored electronically will make it easier to share. There’s very little need to post documents these days. Even documents requiring a signature can be signed online. Having the document stored online means you simply need to attach the document to an email and you’re done. If it was printed, you’d need to scan it, save it and attach it. Or copy it, print an envelope, attach a stamp and go to the post office.
So that you only need one filing system
Most of the documents you receive are probably received via email. So unless you’re currently printing out your emails and filing them, you’ve already got an e-filing system in place. Having a hard copy file as well as an e-file, means there are two places you need to look for a document. By moving to a paperless office, you can eliminate the hard copy file, and concentrate everything in the e-filing system.
To make it easier to find
Having your documents in an e-filing system will make them much easier to find. An e-filing system allows you to do a search of a specific folder or a set of folders. You can search by title, author or text within the files. That way, if something does get misfiled there’s a really good chance you’ll be able to find it anyway. An e-filing system is also much easier to reorganise or sort through than a hard-copy filing system is.
There are five good reasons to aim towards a paperless office. Whether you do it for the environment, or you do it for yourself, it’s something that’s worth doing. And not as difficult as you might think it is.
