What Is Document Management?

For many business owners, the thought of going paperless sounds like a dream come true. Paper is expensive, fragile, and gets easily lost, so reducing the amount you have to pay for not only shaves a ton off your seemingly-endless expenses, but it also helps reduce your carbon footprint. Many different businesses can benefit from going paperless: while a truly paperless office isn’t practical in most situations, taking proactive steps to reduce the amount of paper in your office can actually do wonders towards keeping your costs down.

The High Costs of Paper

There’s no secret that paper is expensive. Even purchased in mass quantities from a business-specific distributor, some companies will spend thousands of dollars on paper every month. Not to mention those who need specially-printed forms will pay a pretty penny whenever they need to restock.

However, the costs go well beyond the purchase of the paper itself. Keeping paper organized is both extremely expensive and deeply flawed in many ways. Estimates from Price Waterhouse Coopers show that for the average business:

• Filing a document costs $20, finding a misfiled one costs $120, and replacing a lost document can cost as much as $250
• Over 10 percent of all paper filing is pointless (roughly 7 percent of all filed papers are lost and 3 percent are misfiled)
• Professionals spend roughly 50 percent of their time with a particular document simply looking for it

Paperless Solutions

Document management could be the solution you’re looking for. This process takes images of existing documents, scans them, and puts them into an electronic storage solution that anyone in your office can access. This cloud-based document storage allows you or anyone at your company to quickly and easily find and read any document they might need. Coupled with electronic document creation, the need for paper is pretty much entirely in the past.

While some companies can’t go entirely paperless (contracts, for example, often require a hard copy with a physical signature to maintain their enforceability), your company may stand to gain and you as a business owner could save a ton of money by employing a document scanning service from Acro Photo Print, Inc.