How can your business go paperless?
How much paper do you still use in your business every day? Invoices and postal payment slips? Do you have a habit of printing important documents and filing them by hand? Is your desk buried in post? Do you print reports and presentations and annotate them in pen?
Here is how and why you can become more environmentally sustainable by cutting paper use.
Why limit paper?
The main reason, and one we care about particularly, is to preserve forests and fight climate change. These are clearly the main benefits of reducing or completely eliminating the use of paper in your business.
But we want to give you six more good reasons to print a little less:
- Saving time: Paper copies of any document need managing and maintaining. Think how long it takes you to transfer changes you have made on a paper document into an electronic file. If you keep paper documents, filing and searching for information can take far more time and effort than you imagine.
- Reduce clutter and save space: Imagine your office without the filing cabinet and the folders of documents. Not to mention all those piles of paper on your desk… Give it a restyle and replace the space taken up by paper with something beautiful, like a plant, or something more useful, like a cup of coffee.
- Saving money: Paper may cost only a few cents a sheet, but everything around it certainly costs a great deal more. A good printer, ink cartridges and storage containers such as filing cabinets and archive boxes can come to hundreds of euro a year. And if you are still sending invoices by post, those are all costs you have to bear.
- Being more agile: In today's world you cannot afford to tell a client that their file is at the office. By definition everyone who runs a business is multi-tasking. You have to be able to answer an email, look for a document and send an invoice at any time and from anywhere. If you rely on paper all this becomes much more burdensome.
- Safety: If your important documents are on paper and your office suffers a disaster such as a fire, a flood or a burglary, what could happen? One of the main reasons many companies turn to cloud-based solutions is precisely security. Everything, from the accounts to client work, can be encrypted to keep it secure, and must be backed up regularly so that documents are virtually sound and far safer than paper.
- Offer your clients a better service: When your operations are digital you have immediate access to everything. From accounting to project management, you can keep track of every communication with clients so that the answer you need is right there.
How to go digital?
Here are some tips that may help you to go paperless and digitise your business in the best way
Digitise your documents
If you have been in business for more than a few years you will certainly have built up a huge amount of paper. Set aside a day or two to go back through it and examine it carefully. Carry out a scanning or simply takes a photo of the ones you want to keep, so that you have a digital copy. So do not be afraid: destroy the documents you do not want to keep, above all those containing sensitive data.
Create your archive
Take some time to think about how archive the files in a smart, useful way so you can find them again in intuitive way. You can organise folders, for example, by client or by project, with subfolders by project or date. Try to be consistent and thorough when you organise your filing system.
Use cloud applications
From accounting to project management there is nothing more convenient than cloud-based software. Your data is not only secure, but you will also be guaranteed theaccess from any device and from wherever you are.
