Eliminate papers from your office

Busy offices can generate a lot of paperwork. But too much paper can cost you a lot of money and drastically reduce your efficiency.

Reducing paper

Paper is everywhere and its global production continues to increase year after year. Even so, you have no reason to continue contributing to it.

Today there’s already the necessary technology to eliminate paper from your office or to reduce it drastically. So: Why haven’t we made this change already? Well basically because most companies have paper very integrated into their processes.

In this guide you’ll find the main benefits of digital documents plus some tips and tricks to reduce paper in your office if you decide to gain efficiency and save money.

The benefits of reducing paper

Reducing paper has many benefits, these are some of the ones you’ll notice most if you reduce papers in your office:

• Faster communications: Emails arrive in seconds, a letter takes at least a day. Paper is too slow for current times.
• Cost reduction: you’ll save money on file cabinets, printers, inks and especially on shipping. You can also reduce your office space because you don’t need to store anything.
• Improves your mobility: You can change offices or work in several places very easily, without having to transport papers or files.
• Quick access to information: Your digital documents can be stored, searched, found and organized much more easily than those in paper format.

And also:

• It’s more respectful to the environment: Less printing represents fewer trees cut and less energy expense to manufacture and transport paper.
• It will give you peace: Papers on the desk not only accumulate dust but also cause stress. Digital file organization is much simpler and your office will be much cleaner. This will help you clear your mind and focus on your business.
• It’s simpler to recover from disasters: If you have your documents in digital format in the cloud, they’re safe from any disaster that could occur in your office: a fire, a flood….

And then, why do we keep using paper?

These are some of the reasons why many companies continue using paper:

• Conservation: paper seems like a good choice for preserving documents for a long period of time judging by the history of parchments for example. But digital files are constantly improving. Today’s PDFs or JPEGs will live much longer than most businesses that are using them.
• Cost: Paper is cheap and easy to distribute. But this is only part of the story. If you take into account the cost of printers, toners, technical services, maintenance, connection … it no longer seems so cheap. And this without taking into account storage expenses.
• Legal requirements: If your country’s legality requires you to keep a paper copy, there’s not much you can do about it. But this is already changing little by little, and many governments are beginning to understand the advantages of digital documents.
• Perception: Sometimes information on a computer or in the cloud doesn’t seem as real to us as what’s on paper. But this is changing as people who have already grown up with computers around them join the job market.

Digital documents can be stored, organized and found much more simply and quickly than those in paper format. The reasons for continuing to use paper are strictly personal or historical, but not logical.

The reasons we continue using paper are personal or historical, but they don’t respond to logical criteria.

Tricks to reduce paper

Reducing paper isn’t something that can be done overnight, you have to plan your transition to achieve it. These are some tricks that can be very helpful:

• Training is needed: Not everyone is prepared to work with digital documents, a review of basic concepts with your entire team can be very helpful.
• Monitor printing: Consider using small software to monitor who and when prints. It’s not about playing police, it’s simply about teaching to use paper only for what’s strictly necessary.
• Improve your office: You’ll need less space to store documents, so you can modify your office organization to turn it into a better place to work.
• Eliminate old technology: Some companies continue using fax. Today there are programs that allow receiving and sending a fax, so it’s time to give away your fax and stop losing money on toners and paper.
• Encourage your team to stop using printing: Invite them to dinner or a beer when you achieve improvements in paper reduction.
• Calculate what you’ll save: There are few things more powerful than a figure, add up all printing costs (printers, toners, paper, maintenance,…) and realize how expensive paper is.
• Scan paper documents: You can use a classic scanner or even some of the multiple smartphone apps at your disposal. TurboScan is one of them and works wonderfully.
• Sign your documents digitally: In most countries digital signature already has the same validity as signature on a paper document.
• Start using online applications: Cloud applications allow you to share information with your suppliers and clients very easily. One of them can be your invoicing program.
• Use online banking: Ask your bank to stop sending you papers. If you’re worried about missing something, configure your account to send you notifications. Start paying your bills online as soon as possible.

Should the transition to online office be quick?

Well, this depends exclusively on you. You can do it all at once, but it might be a bit stressful for you and the rest of your team, especially if you have a lot of work.

It makes more sense to do it without hurry but without pause. Start with a specific area of your company like invoice issuing for example and then attack others like quotes, expenses, delivery notes… In each of these phases you can learn things that will be very useful in the next one.

These are some tips to make this transition much easier:

• Backup regularly: if you don’t have your data in the cloud or in an online invoicing program, backup regularly. Electronic documents are much easier to store but also to delete.
• Go step by step: achieving the online office is a goal, but each small step you take to reduce paper is already a success. If you have to print obligatorily remember to print more than one page on each sheet of paper and use both sides of the page.
• Organize everything: take advantage of the storage facilities that electronic documents give you and organize them with criteria. Make it very easy to locate information later. Remember to modify the file name if you use a scanner.

Paper is a thing of the past

We’ve been talking about the online office for years and now thanks to technology and cloud applications, it’s already possible.

Reducing paper has multiple advantages for you, for your business and also for your suppliers and clients. Apart from the cost savings it means, it will give you a lot of flexibility to be able to manage your business from anywhere. And have the information you need when you need it.

Stop losing space storing paper documents, now you can save all documents simply and securely in the cloud, without losing or paying a single square meter of space.

Paper piles in your office are part of the past, the future is digital.

FacturaDirecta is an online invoicing program that allows you to create and store your documents in digital format, in addition to eliminating paper from your company. Try it now and discover everything that cloud invoicing can do to simplify your business.