For any company or business today, big or small, documents are key to getting the job done, and traditionally, this means physical documents printed on paper that are kept in the workplace. These can be financial reports, memos, strategy plans, marketing updates, and much more, but as of recently, businesses have come to realize that too much paper in the office can be a real problem, and for more than one reason. Instead, going digital with documents has become the trend, and there are entire services such as digital scanning services out there to help a client business convert its many paper documents into digital files. Why are document digitization services so desirable and useful today, and what effects will converting documents have on the workplace? Scanning on site can yield a number of benefits, and can even prevent serious disaster or danger on the workplace. What are some of the detrimental effects of excess paper, and how can this be fixed with digital scanning services?
The Problem of Paper
Paper is not being phased out of business entirely; it is still too convenient to pass around paper documents at will, without needing a computer or tablet to look over a file or mail it to someone. But having too much paper in the workplace does present a number of issues, some with logistics, others with convenience or even safety. A lot of time is wasted, and a lot of money spent, looking for missing or badly filed paper documents, and this can result in money being lost finding or replacing these many paper documents. Just how bad is this problem? At best, it can take five minutes to visit a filing cabinet, find a desired document, use it, and return it to the cabinet, and this can add up fast. And if documents are lost or destroyed by accident, searching for them or reproducing them can be expensive and slow. In fact, it has been determined that $20 will be spent to file and store a document, and $120 or more may be spent to find or replace misfiled documents.
Even if documents are not lost or misfiled, excess paper can still be a problem that digital scanning services can fix if hired. Excess paper means that a lot of filing cabinets and storage boxes are being used to contain them all, and this simply takes up a lot of room that can be used for other purposes. What is more, all this paper is the perfect kindling for an accidental fire. Cigarettes are rarely smoked in the workplace as compared to decades past, but electrical fires, those that result from exposed wires touching flammable materials, are still a real risk. A massive stockpile of paper documents is a banquet for a fire that’s waiting to happen. And finally, an issue with many paper documents is that they are slow to be transported to someone who needs them; if a traveling business professional needs a document, but it is only in paper form, delivery will be very slow and often too late to be useful. For these reasons and more, document conversion services and digital scanning services can be called upon to fix the paper mess.
The Work of Digital Scanning Services
As a workplace accumulate enough paper documents, the time will come to start scanning them en masse and store them in Cloud Internet services or in a business’s private data servers. Once digital scanning services are hired, they will rapidly scan and digitize many thousands of documents and store them correctly in a data server or Internet Cloud account, and this will yield a number of benefits. For one thing, these digital documents can be transported extremely quickly as compared to paper mail. A traveling business professional, or an employee who always works remotely, can obtain a desired document within seconds if it is a digital file that can be e-mailed to that remote worker. The boss may also appreciate this speed if he or she needs a particular document while away from the business; after all, some 77% of business owners want to be able to remotely access documents at will, and digitizing them all makes this much easier. Removing paper also removes clutter and the fire hazard.
