Businesses and organizations alike, for decades, have relied on paper as their primary medium for keeping records. Of course it would be, right? Aside from the human mind and memorizing everything it can be said that paper was the first, most useful form of a filing solution ever created. It’s easy to manufacture, easy to use, readily available, and can be used for multiple purposes.

Paper has been the backbone for many organizations for a very long time now, but the question is why? Why do businesses and organizations still use paper in a time like now where technology has so advanced that even their phones have notepads and writing software of all kinds? Some phones even come with built in digital pens that can be useful for annotating documents!

The Pitfalls of Paper

Although paper is useful in all the ways previously mentioned, paper also has its downfalls. It’s easy to manufacture, but it can also get quite expensive. “According to a study by the Gartner Group, 90 percent of businesses don’t actually know how much they spend on printing every year”, and that’s not just talking about the cost of paper, that’s also talking about the cost of ink cartridges, the amount of times a document is misprinted and has to be printed again, and if we branch off we can even talk about the costs of having to fix jammed printers regularly due to high volume printing. Another thing to consider is a statement put out by the Ray Morgan Company. They say, according to their client print assessments, that “print is typically the third highest business operating expense behind rent and payroll”…wild isn’t it?

Inefficiency Vs. Peak Performance

Paper being so readily available, and so easy to use is actually another reason why it’s best to be replaced with something better. The fact that it’s so readily available more often than not leads us to use it more often than we should and the more we print the harder it is to handle. Where is all that paper going to go?

 It’s probably going to end up like the rest of the printed paperwork, in countless file cabinets and stacks of other paper documents. It becomes cumbersome to handle, it becomes clutter, and anything that is cumbersome and creates clutter automatically creates inefficiencies. That’s the last thing any business needs. To be a successful business, running at peak performance, there needs to be systems in place to mitigate inefficiencies as best and as much as possible.

The Paperless Solution

Where do organizations go from here then, if not to the traditional paper filing solutions and systems? Naturally they move onto paperless hardware/software solutions. It’s a win/win/win situation for the organization, the employees, and the clients alike. They’ve already made the transition years ago from snail mail to email, why? Because it’s better all around. E-mail is quicker for communication, it’s easier to write, send, and receive, it doesn’t take up physical space (for the most part, unless they’re using in-house servers), it’s easy to access from anywhere (even from a cell phone), and ultimately it’s faster for everyone to search up any particular document, or message with a few clicks of a button. These very similar, if not same, reasons are why paperless filing solutions are the best option for successful organizations to streamline their systems and maximize their efficiency.

 With digital documentation there is no longer a need to print anything, unless they find themselves in a situation where they absolutely must. A benefit of documentation being digital is that any document can be edited and annotated by anyone who has permission to access it, or the document can be set to read-only to ensure that only those who have the authority to edit said documentation can, and those who don’t can only read it.

Going digital nullifies any need to have endless rows of filing cabinets. Everything is stored on a network. No more clutter, no more digging through stacks of papers trying to find where that important list of instructions was placed. All files can be searched up by name and found within seconds. That’s a huge benefit when the employer needs to get some important time sensitive file out to their employee, or when some client information needs to be pulled up asap.

In this modern age of technology there really is no longer a reason to continue doing things the old sluggish way. Organizations need streamlined systems, they need more efficient ways to cut down on time, cost, and resources, and there really is no better way to achieve this, currently, than by introducing paperless filing solutions.