NoPaperFiles.com

Always the most significant costs to any organization are people costs. People are required to print, file and distribute paper documents. Also since people are unfortunately prone to making mistakes, one has to include the costs associated with having to re-perform these functions. Consider the time it takes for an employee to first search for a document that was misfiled, realize that the document isn’t where it should be, notify the affected individuals, and then reprint the document all over again.

Paper and Printer Toner are by far the two largest office supplies expense of any organization. Ask 1,000 different employees of well-known office supply giants, Staples, Office Depot etc., what two products they sell the most of and you’ll get the same answer: paper and toner. These costs are also easily identified and quantified from Accounts Payable invoices. Simple estimates of paper and toner reductions can be easily converted to cost savings that go directly to the bottom line of an organization. Other miscellaneous costs include storage supplies (manila folders, hanging folders, labels, file cabinets, etc.), shredding costs, archival costs, and mailing costs.

The costs associated with printers, copiers, faxing machines, shredders, and the maintenance to keep them running are all significant office expenditures. Printers, copiers, and fax machines are also sophisticated mechanical devices. We are probably still many years away from being able to manufacture printers that don’t routinely jam and require the assistance of trained individuals. The less that these machines are used, the greater the savings to an organization.

Paper documents need to be located in close proximity to workers, which requires extensive amounts of expensive storage space. Most often these storage spaces need to be protected from environmental hazards, such as fire or water damage. They also need to be heated, cooled and de-humidified if documents are to maintain a reasonable shelf-life. The cost of square footage to store these documents on-site cannot be discounted.

Historical documents that are necessary to keep for seven to ten years because of Federal Regulations, while valuable, are normally not worth storing in the main office where the square footage costs are the highest. These are therefore stored Off-Site at a lower square footage cost. However, anyone familiar with retrieval of Off-Site documents knows that this is a time consuming and sometimes painful process. This is because the designing of the methodology for storage and retrieval of Off-Site documents is either not well thought out and documented or the policy is not followed at all. This is often true whether it is your Off-Site storage or a third party company which is doing it for you. Lastly, the process of who decides what information is to go off-site and the people time involved to “review” your paper files before the trip to Off-Site Storage, is always time consuming and costly.