Paperless or “Less” Paper

Chip Meyer
CEO, The Chip, Inc., a Microsoft Gold Partner focused on technology solutions for small business

Information at your fingertips: that’s the goal for any business owner.  Make sure your employees can quickly find the information they need, the moment they need it.  The faster they can access key data, the faster they can respond to customers, and the more efficient they become.  Happier customers, reduced collection times, more control over your inventory and vendors, the list goes on.  In raw terms, time really does equal money.

The IT world is driven by this basic fact, and the whole “paperless” concept is based on the theory that you can find data on a computer faster than you can search stacks of paper.  The trick to going paperless is to understand the workflow behind each piece of paper your company generates.  This is not a casual discussion, nor one that allows a stranger to walk in to your business and immediately know the answers. 

Some companies start by scanning everything, only to discover they still can’t find anything.  Others skip the scanning of older documents, and thereby create a more complex process where you have to search in boxes and on the computer in order to find things.

Simply put, the value of any data is the actual worth, multiplied by the probability that you can find it when you need it.  Therefore, the cost of data storage is more than the cost of the paper or the hard drive, it is also the cost of sorting and maintaining that data in a manner that can be easily retrieved. 

Before you look at going paperless, you should estimate what your existing storage costs are.  Is there information in storage that you need to review on a regular basis?  How long does it take to find a page?  What is the cost in time or money of not being able to find it?  What is the storage cost? 

Next, look at all the ways you create more paper.  Some may be unavoidable.  The person on the phone taking notes may not be able to type fast enough to data-enter all that information while they are on the phone, and might not remember it accurately enough after the call to finish the entry.  Can you afford to have errors in data entry?  Do all your employees even have access to a computer as needed, or do some employees enter data for others?

Often, paper of some type is a continuing requirement.  Signatures on delivery, changes to work orders, there are points in time where the workflow of your employees makes sense to continue creating paper.  In such cases, scanning the documents after creation might be more efficient than storing them.

Other paper items might be easier to eliminate.  If your accounting system can re-print invoices at will, do you really need to print and store a copy of every invoice?  Have you asked your customers if they would prefer to receive invoices by email? 

The best way to go paperless is to stop printing so much.  Reports of various types are great examples of items that get printed far more often than really needed.  Next week, the report has changed, and you throw away or archive any previous paper versions.  Electronic reports are much more efficient.  

After reviewing your entire company workflow, you can evaluate the potential savings of going paperless for all or some of your activities, as well as the cost of scanning any existing archives.  Keep in mind that paperless technology has dramatically improved the past couple of years.

The latest scanners are capable of scanning both sides of a paper simultaneously, handling mixed page sizes, and even maintaining document groups.  This eliminates much of the labor previously associated with scanning, making the process much more affordable. 

Likewise, software continues its advance, with the ability to read scanned images and attach that text onto the scan, allowing you to freely search your documents in a way you could never do in a manual system.   There is even software capable of reading scanned forms and acting like a data-entry person.   

For most companies, even if you can’t go paperless, you can certainly go less paper.