There are lots of great reasons for going paperless in the office—these range from worries over environmental impact through to budgetary and efficiency concerns.
It’s estimated that the average office worker will use 10,000 sheets of paper each year.
How many people do you have working in your office?
Not only are there costs involved in buying paper, printers, ink, toner, as well as maintaining your printers, there is also the time that it takes to print, file, post, or retrieve paperwork to think about.
You may wonder how to go paperless at work when you consider the cost of using paper in your business.
The paperless office makes running a business more efficient. However, it may seem daunting to make such a big change in the way that you operate.
Making the switch is easier than you may think though. Here’s how to go paperless at work.
How to Go Paperless at Work: Getting Started
There are three main development areas to think about when you go paperless.
These are:
- Finding the right software
- Developing new systems of working
- Training your team
Plan ahead. It will take a while before you are entirely paperless. Once you have the software in place and have briefed your teams, you will be able to start removing existing paperwork from the office.
Digitizing all of your old paperwork will be time-consuming, particularly if you are a company that needs to hold onto a lot of documents or have many year’s records.
Start off my shredding any paperwork that is no longer needed. Then start scanning paperwork that needs to be kept and maintain a filing system to suit,
Let Your Clients Know
If you currently issue paper invoices, let all of your customers know ahead of the change to paperless.
You will need to ensure that you have email addresses of all of your clients; that way, you will be able to email them their invoice instead of printing and posting it.
If your client still prefers to use fax to receive their paperwork, you can find software that will send your PDFs through to your customer’s fax machine.
Use Paperless Check Stubs
One everyday use for paper in the workplace is to print out employee payslips.
Your staff needs a record of what they have been paid. But if you are going paperless at work, then you won’t be able to hand these out.
By using a check stub maker to create PDF records of employee pay will not only save you on money, but it will also save you any time or money that you would normally need to spend on distributing them.
A PDF can be emailed directly to your employees. If they need a print out of the wage slip, they can do print this out themselves.
Ready to go Paperless?
Now you know how to go paperless at work, are you ready to make the biggest change to the way that your office runs?
Be sure and check out the rest of the blog for more great articles on ways to improve your business.
