Just about every company these days is looking for ways to go green. They are looking to make an impact on the environment by lowering their carbon footprint and being a better global citizen. By reducing the amount of paper being used in offices, there are fewer trees being cut down to make paper and fewer resources like water being wasted.
Since there are other ways of moving documents around since even signatures can be digitized, there seems to be little need to have a physical copy. This isn’t a cut-and-dried thing, however. There are pros and cons to going paperless so it pays to understand what you may be getting into. In this article, we will go over what it means to go paperless so you can decide if it is the best fit for your company.
Some of the cons
Sometimes it’s best to start with the negatives so let’s begin with the less-than-ideal aspects of going paperless. For starters, physical copies are nice to have in case your server gets hacked or even loses its data somehow. Of course, you always need to have a backup to the backup but things happen, so continuing to use managed services for your office’s print needs is a wise move.
It’s a lot harder for somebody to physically break into a filing cabinet and steal a document. It’s far easier for somebody with technical skills to hack into a server and steal a document or data.
There are also consumer habits to consider since many customers still like getting physical invoices and receipts. Sometimes it is going to be an uphill battle to convince others in your orbit to take the paperless campaign seriously and not expect to always get physical copies. This means that some of your purveyors, customers, or others will still need you to be printing for their sake.
Some of the pros
There are more pros than cons when it comes to going paperless. The effect you’ll have in lowering your carbon footprint goes without saying.
There are other benefits, however, such as the cost. You will save lots of money when you go paperless. Not only in the cost of the paper that you are no longer using. The cost of buying and maintaining the printers will also be dramatically lowered. There is also the cost of lost work time being spent on troubleshooting the printers and even just the time wasted waiting for things to print.
Moving physical copies of paper around takes a long time. The speed at which you can distribute documents and have them signed digitally is a fraction of what it takes to wait for these things to be done when you have to use paper. Since so much of your workforce is going to be dispersed all over the place working remotely and not always in one office, you can’t expect to be sending paper everywhere.
