For any business growing and developing, it will come to a point where the ways of old don’t scale. 

The history of a company is often stored in filing cabinets and old physical files of past client contracts and financial records. 

These filing cabinets can silently become a major bottleneck in your business as it grows and operates faster. 

Those stacks of paper that you tell yourself you will deal with tomorrow could be consuming hours of employees’ time searching for one piece of paper. 

That’s hours that could be spent dealing with customers or closing more business. We have all been there.

When your team is in the zone and trying to move fast, hours can be lost in what seems like a chaotic search for a single piece of paper. 

The paper could be a contract or another document, but it’s been left on someone’s desk and has been pushed to the back of the pile. In the meantime, someone else has left their desk to search for the paper, perhaps making a few phone calls along the way to find it.

Ever stop to work out just how much time your employees spend searching for legacy contracts, i.e., old paper documents?

A modern workplace needs to be agile, and information needs to be accessible in seconds from anywhere. 

The hum of a laptop at midnight is stressful enough without wondering whether or not a vital invoice is locked in a cabinet on the other side of town. 

Eliminating paper from a workplace is not just about saving physical space; it’s about unlocking the true velocity of the business.

The Real Friction of Physical Storage

While the cost of paper in terms of reams, printer paper, toner, and maintenance of your printers is typically known by business leaders, the real financial impact of storing physical documents is typically the space that is required to store all of the boxes and folders of historical data. 

As office space becomes increasingly valuable, the cost of storing historical data in a physical filing system is very high. It can typically be used for much more valuable purposes, such as creating collaboration spaces or generating revenue.

Beyond the cost of paper, the physical storage of historical documents also takes up space that could be better utilized elsewhere in the office, such as collaborative team workspaces or even revenue-generating areas. 

And on the administrative side, storing historical documents requires overhead that could be put to better use elsewhere in the organization.

But what happens when you factor in security?

Paper files don’t have an audit trail. 

You can’t find out who last looked at a file, when it was last opened, or even if a page was copied. 

The worst scenario is a natural disaster that destroys all of your physical files. 

The best way to protect your business against such a disaster is to store all your files digitally. Paper-based files are a single point of failure for business continuity.

Building a Seamless Workflow

It takes a strategy to enable your business to manage its data far better than it currently does. 

Simple technologies are readily available and can speed up your workflow, but they can also create a bigger mess. 

So, for example, scanning all your papers into your desktop could create a mess of poorly labeled files on your desktop and within your desktop folders. In short, technology without strategy is bad.

Ingesting historical records in an organized fashion requires a solid, structured approach and is generally best left to the experts. 

A company with a large historical record of files numbering in the thousands is better off hiring a professional document scanning service rather than having its best people spend their time on tedious work that is outside of their core competencies to get your company’s historical records of contracts, etc., digitized and put into your company’s cloud storage, where they can be searched by keyword or by specific metadata.

It changes everything.

Once your archive is digitized, it no longer matters where your team members are. 

They can work in their favorite coffee shop or in the headquarters. Every team member has access to all information in the archive 24/7. Information is up to date. 

Team members can work on the same information simultaneously. Automated version control is included as standard.

Cultivating a Digital First Culture

This change requires more than just technology to deliver results, because the biggest challenge to going paperless is changing human behavior. 

To create a ‘digital first’ workplace, leaders must change the way their teams work by clearly demonstrating the benefits of going paperless and by facilitating a cultural shift toward digital work.

Show your team how digitized workflows eliminate the tedious parts of their day. 

When an account manager can pull up a client’s history during a live phone call instead of asking to call the client back, the value becomes instantly clear.

So, where do you actually begin?

To start, audit your current papers. 

Where is the paper coming into the organization today? 

That’s whether it’s mail, printed out invoices, or signed contracts. 

Identify all the places where paper is entering your organization, then begin replacing them with paperless processes, one department at a time, such as signing contracts digitally or automatically emailing out invoices. 

As you close the loop on new papers coming into the organization, you can continue to digitize older archives to create and maintain a sustainable, efficient system that will support your organization’s future growth.