This guide outlines four easy digital solutions to progress your business to a paperless office.
While many companies around the world are transferring to paperless office solutions for environmental reasons, going paperless has additional benefits like speeding up production and creating greater efficiency.
4 digital solutions for a paperless office
In this online day and age, there are various digital solutions you can choose for your business. Here are some that you should definitely consider.
Digital Paystubs
If employees need to prove their employment status quickly, it can take time to complete and obtain paper paystubs. But by using a quality online service, you can make a paystub that is downloadable in no time at all. If a paper copy is required, you can easily print out the digital paystub.
Furthermore, by using an online paystub maker, you gain the added benefit of auto-complete and calculation features for earnings and income tax deductions, helping you to speed up calculation processes and ensuring you get accurate data.
Electronic Signature Software
Other types of forms can be digital solutions in addition to paystubs. That includes forms, and any other digital documents, that require signatures. Gone are the days where only ink-signed paper copies of forms, documents, and contracts are legally recognized. Today, you can use a variety of software tools to handle digital documents and sign them with e-signatures.
By getting signatures electronically, processes can be majorly sped up. After all, you no longer have to send a document in the mail and wait for the recipient to sign it and send it back, all of which would take days. For international paper documents, it could even take weeks. With digital solutions, you can potentially get secure signatures within seconds.
Cloud-based Storage
Having all of your files online makes accessing those documents much easier and quicker for everyone concerned. With a cloud-based storage system, you can store vast amounts of data and enable authorized users to access it anytime and anywhere. And with digital solutions, each department, team, or individual employee can have a safe and easy way to store files in their own folders.
The best cloud-based storage systems are highly secure and have powerful backups to ensure you never lose any of your data.
Scanning Existing Documents
Using digital solutions is not only environmentally friendly. It also means you save a lot of office space if you transfer all of your paper documents to digital and create all of your future documents digitally. So, consider scanning all of your existing paper documents.
Sure, it will take time to complete the task, especially if you have records and files that stretch back years, but digital solutions will save you time in the long run. When staff members need to continually search for old records manually, it takes a lot of time compared to the few seconds it takes to locate in the cloud. Having one unified system in itself means potential issues are alleviated.
Scan each document and save it in an appropriately named folder. You can also add password protection to folders for additional protection. By eliminating unnecessary paper archives, you also gain additional office space. That means you could hire more people, get new equipment, or cut costs by downsizing to smaller premises. And anytime you move business premises, it will be much easier to do so when you do not have dozens of filing cabinets with paper documents to move.
Getting More Laptops
When you move to digital solutions, you need to make sure all of your employees can access digital content whenever they need to do so. That could mean buying more laptops for your office.
The last thing you want is to have a shortage that results in employees printing out documents, as that would defeat the object of going paperless.
What does a paperless office actually mean?
A paperless office aims to manage all documents digitally if possible. There are a few rules to be observed regarding archiving with digital solutions, but on the whole it is very simple and easy to implement with only a few tools. All you have to do is first understand what you want to store and how in which structure and who should have access to the data.
In order to continue to use digital solutions, you also have to get used to a routine and try to switch companies from which you receive paper mail to digital documents. For example, only get invoices digitally and also deposit them directly digitally. Read everything else, scan it and then shred it when you’re sure it has landed in the digital storage.
Advantages of digital solutions
You can find what you are looking for faster with digital solutions because the files can be tagged with dates and keywords or are simply stored very sensibly. If you choose a cloud server such as Google or Evernote, you still have all files with you no matter where you are.
You can’t lose anything with digital solutions because a hard drive crashed or you accidentally push it off the edge of the table. Has it happened to all of us, hasn’t it? You can still write down everything by hand to better visualize it. All you have to do is either scan it or enter it right away via screen such as with an iPad Pro.
There are now pretty good apps that recognize the handwriting super well and can also convert it relatively well into text if you want to process what you have written differently. Your documents can thus also be processed.
