How Long Does It Take You to Find a File?

Are you able to access the information you need when you need it? How long does this take? For far too many businesses, the answer is sadly far too long!

You will be familiar with the pattern – you’re speaking with a client or a supplier and you need to provide an answer immediately. You know the answer is somewhere amongst your filing but where? Instead of being able to answer the question quickly, you find yourself saying “I’ll get back to you” and then spend several minutes or even hours hunting down the information you need or worse forgetting to do so.

Is this any way to run your business at any time, let alone in these increasingly challenging times with so many employees working away from the office!

You may well have more than a hunch that paper-based filing is inefficient but for your own good reasons have not yet made the leap to going paperless.

Maybe this is because of concerns over cost or you fear a massive upheaval in doing so and therefore soldier on amidst your continuing frustrations, insecurity and likely inefficiencies.

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So, What is the Real Cost of Working with Paper?

According to recent reliable analysis, traditional paper-based document management typically costs between 13 and 31 times the actual cost of purchasing the paper. Why? because it’s not simply the cost of purchasing the paper, it’s also the cost of the space taken up filing cabinets, the cost of off-site archive storage, photocopying costs, and the cost of time lost looking for files.

Manually filing and retrieving paper documents takes time. Research shows that it can cost as much as:

£15 to file a document in a folder or filing cabinet
£90 to find a misfiled document (if you can find it at all)
£165 to reproduce a document that was lost

Other commonly quoted statistics include:

The average document in an office gets copied 20 times
7.5% of all documents get lost
3% of the remainder get misfiled
Employees spend 5-15% of their time reading information, however up to 50% of their time searching for it.

You may conclude that these statistics don’t apply to your business, that you run a far tighter operation. However, it is inescapable that no amount of good management will ever make a paper-based system truly efficient.

Is it now time to look differently at how you are doing things?

Take a Fresh Look at Your Business Processes

Most of the paper you hold and work with is likely to form part of some process or other. Start by taking a long hard look at these procedures, are they cumbersome because of paper or does the procedure generate the paper?

In many businesses certain departments typically account for much of the company’s paper generation, notably (1) Finance; (2) Human Resources; (3) the Post Room.

Can your business remove paper forms and traditional signatures? In the UK, the eIDAS Regulations of 2000 provide validity to electronic signatures, thus making an electronic signature as legally binding as a hard-copy signature.

Consider a Central Cloud-Based Document Management System

Like it or not, the Cloud is here to stay, with more and more of both our personal and business lives being managed within it. A properly secured Cloud Solution is without doubt much safer than paper providing security, accountability and full track and trace audit tools.

Some businesses are concerned that their sensitive data stored in the Cloud may be hacked. Such incidents are incredibly rare and are almost always attributable to a lack of proper security measures and in all cases are far outweighed by the benefits delivered of efficiency, security and compliance.

If you have been considering a move to a paperless environment for a while, or the events of this year have persuaded you that a paper-based approach no longer works in the new way of working why not get in touch here to arrange an initial no obligation consultation and see what a difference going paperless can make for your business.

2nd December 2020

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