Go Paperless in 2015 & Save Office Space

We are fast approaching the end of January, this first month of the New Year, a month full of healthy eating and New Year’s resolutions for people at home. At work, businesses may also be hoping to make a fresh start to 2015, becoming more efficient, saving money and increasing productivity. There are many things companies can do to help improve their business processes, scanning and archiving old paperwork to increase office floor space should be considered.

Digitisation of documents can help save floor space.

Office space is a valuable commodity and businesses should be making the most of the space they have available. By replacing the old bulky filing cabinets with digitised copies of your company paperwork is a fantastic way of freeing up space.

Digitised copies are easier to store, they are easily backed up and easier to search. Staff can save time locating important documents via the computer rather than manually flipping through the files in the cabinets. They are also much easier to distribute and share among co-workers.

Digital storage provides a much higher level of protection from disasters such as flooding or fire damage, your documents are safer when stored electronically. Even better would be to store these within the “cloud”, so they can be accessed from anywhere at any time, night or day.

A few things to consider…

• How much does office space cost?
• How many archive boxes and filing cabinets do you have at present?
• How many extra desks or work stations could you fit into your office if you archive your documents?
• Would it be possible to downsize your office if you went paperless, saving money?
• What percentage of time is spent searching through filing cabinets for specific documents?
• How secure is your paper based archive? Who has access to it?

Here is a useful fact, 28 filing cabinets or 247,500 paper documents will fit onto just 1 DVD, saving 24 square feet of office space.

Scanning these documents in house would take a very long time and would be counter productive, it is common practice for this type of work to be outsourced to a document scanning company.

Find out more about scanning bureau's here.

How can a scanning bureau help?

Scanning bureau’s take the headache out of document scanning, they are equipped with state of the art scanning equipment which will quickly and efficiently scan huge batches of documents in one go. Once these batches have been scanned they are then saved digitally to the computer and indexed allowing you to quickly locate documents.

Data such as invoice numbers, supplier name or the date can be extracted using clever software, saving you time on manual data entry improving the accuracy of business information. This is most commonly used for financial documentation such as invoices or claims.

Digital versions of your documents can be stored within the “cloud” allowing you to access your documents from any location, they can also be stored in a document management software for fast and efficient retrieval, distribution and security.

Finally, a document scanning bureau can also act as your “mailroom”, taking your business post and digitising the paperwork upon arrival.