What is a Paperless Office?
A paperless office is a workplace environment with minimal paper-based administrative processes relying more on digitized documents to organize and record company processes instead of hard paper copies. Some organizations refer to the concept as “paper-light” as many offices and departments understand that they cannot completely eliminate paper due to compliance depending on the country or state requirements. In general, most businesses are moving towards the paperless model to some degree as it recognized that the space required to house records is at a premium and the need to have a hard copy is needed less and less in today’s digital age.
Electronic invoicing is becoming popular as world governments are taking steps towards digitizing the tax system to create a comprehensive digital tax ecosystem. To achieve these objectives, administrative bodies are promoting e-invoicing and encouraging companies to make the switch to a digital paper trail. With the right software management system an office can evolve to a paperless environment in a matter of months.
While the introduction of invoice management software will never completely replace paper-based tax invoices in all business transactions, it is already possible for VAT parties to send e-invoices and receipts voluntarily using the e-Tax Invoice and Receipt systems.
Benefits of a Paperless Office
By moving away from paper-based administrative systems, companies can reduce the risk of human errors and oversights that come with manual document management and data entry. Reducing the use of paper helps to speed up a company’s record management systems. Corporations in America spend more than $120 billion per year on printed forms alone, most of which become obsolete within three months and end up being archived off-site or worse thrown away or recycled. Office workers in administrative roles typically spend up to 40% of their time looking for documents in physical file cabinets that could be just as easily obtained through the click of a button. Records are not required to be kept onsite electronically on an eternal hard drive HDD backup system. Storage can be outsourced to a cloud storage services via a fast internet connection and with help from your electronic document management software.
Typically, the most paper-intense departments within an organization are human resources departments, accounts payable and receivable departments, facilities management and customer service. A high volume of applications, payment advices, invoices, resumes, receipts, work orders, payment orders and invoices have historically taken up large volumes of space with a company’s infrastructure. Gone are the days of faxes and telex messages – emails and messages are the common way to conduct business, and if stored do not need to be printed and kept in hard copy.
Adopting a paperless system can save time spent on locating and retrieving physical paper documents and files. Digital documents can be easily organized and discovered much faster with computerized search systems. As documents become more accessible in today’s digital age, the time taken to retrieve files is significantly cut down so your team can be more productive and focus on other high-value tasks.
