Going digital can save you time and money. With paper documents, you have to rifle through possibly thousands of stacks before you find what you are looking for. In fact, a typical four-drawer filing cabinet holds as much as 12,000 pieces of paper. This makes locating the right document almost impossible, and about a quarter of business documents go missing forever, according to Datapro/Gartner Group. Moreover, one study showed that some companies waste more than $6 million dollars annually trying to retrieve information that is nonexistent, and recreating data that has been lost. Instead of pouring money into what appears to be a useless endeavor, consider using wireless scanning tools and portable scanners to go digital.
But turning your documents into a digital data does not mean that you have to sit in your office all day and feed documents into your printer. Portable scanners with wireless capabilities can be taken anywhere, and many of them come with cloud scanning abilities. This means that once your receipts, documents or papers are loaded into the scanner, they can be automatically sent to a cloud storage service or emailed wherever you want. If you want them stored in a shared location for other employees to access them, a cloud computing system can be an efficient way to organize the data. Cloud networks are becoming a popular way for business share and store information securely, as they do not require any additional workers to manage them. By 2014, CRN predicts that small businesses will spend $100 billion on cloud computing because of its convenience and user-friendly infrastructure. Investing in a cloud-based system could also result in lower overhead costs because fewer workers are needed on-site to oversee data, and all IT concerns can be directed to the cloud service provider itself.
Take the leap into digital filing. Do not waste your time navigating drawers of papers and documents that might not even be relevant anymore. It will take some initial work to get these papers scanned, but once you are finished, you will have instant access to these documents whenever you want. Storing your information on a cloud system will also make viewing and sharing data easier, and it would be worth your time to look into placing all your documents on a large shared cloud server. Make the switch to digital documentation, and watch your company become more efficient.