If you recall from our previous article on the benefits of going paperless we mentioned our top eight reasons of why your office should consider reducing the use of paper in the office.
In this article we are going to discuss three more of our favorite benefits of switching to a reduced paper system, focusing more on the cost-advantages.
Although a lot of people feel that switching to a paperless office costs more due to training and having to invest in hardware and software, it actually will pay off in the long run.
Studies done by Berkeley, Gartner, and IDC show that reducing paper use:
- Triples processing capacity (Gartner),
- Increases productivity up to 50% (IDC),
- Creates immediate access to decision-critical data (which is the real goal), and
- Reduces storage space cost by up to 80%.
This, in turn will increase your company’s ROI.
So with that being said here are our top three cost-based reasons to switch to a paperless system.
1) Labor Savings
According to a study done by the IDC, the average employee spends 2.5 hours a day searching for papers.
Yikes, that is 12.5 hours a week!
By switching to a paperless system you can reduce that search time tenfold, since most information will be stored on a network that you can search using keywords associated with the file.
This can save your company around $50 a week per employee.
2) Printing Costs
We did the calculation in the previous blog post but we will do it again here since the number is so surprising.
The average employee uses a mind-blowing 10,000 sheets of copy paper every year. 10,000 pieces of paper = 2 Boxes x $50 per box = $100 per employee!
Of course you can’t avoid printing all pieces of paper, but let’s say hypothetically you were able to cut that amount in half.
You would be saving $50 per employee per year. This may not seem like a lot, but take in consideration of an office that has 100 employees; that’s $5000 a year which really accumulates over time.
3) Storage Costs
If you are an office manager I’m sure you are more aware of how expensive those clunky file cabinets are.
Each 3-door file cabinet costs around $300 and there plenty of them in the average office.
If you are an office with a high influx of paper, then chances are you are going to have to invest in more cabinets as time goes by. This alone is already a hefty price.
Now let’s also consider the price of maintaining the space for all this storage.
PricewaterhouseCoopers reports that on average, a company spends $25,000 to fill one file cabinet and an additional $2,100 a year to maintain that cabinet.
As you can see the price of storing paper adds up quite quickly.
I hope this has enlightened your point of view on exactly how much using paper in the office cant cost your company. If you are considering switching to a paperless office, then check out these strategies on how efficiently implement such a system.
