Going paperless has been a trend that’s increasingly popular among remote-first businesses. If your business is using a lot of digital processes, the prospect of going paperless may be interesting to you. But what does it mean to go paperless? What are the advantages and disadvantages that you should be aware of? How do you do it?
In this article, we’ll overview the process of going paperless and what you need to prepare for to be a digital business or go digital at home.
What Does It Mean To Go Paperless?
You may be surprised by what going paperless is centered around: Communication.
Until computers and the internet, most remote communication had to be through paper. Phones were effective but could only transmit audio. For documents, contracts, letters, reports, and other physical materials your best option was to print them out and mail them. Eventually, businesses would start to use fax machines to remotely transmit these documents over phone lines to save time (and money!).
In the digital age, we don’t need to print papers anymore. File formats can handle spreadsheets, documents, and images. We can send these files over the web without ever needing to print them.
This is what it means to be paperless: Forgoing devices like printers, fax machines, and scanners that handle physical paper. They also remove the physical cabinets where paper documents need to be stored. Paperless is an increasingly common practice that your business may, at this very moment, be considering. So what should you think about as you make your decision?
Advantages & Disadvantages of Going Paperless
Advantages
- Saving money
- Printer + ink costs
- Fax machine phone line fees
- Storage for documents (short- and long-term)
- Saving time
- Physically filing paper documents
- Searching for historic documents and information
- Ordering supplies and repairing equipment
- Backup + redundancy
- Less susceptible to physical damage (fire, flood, moisture)
- Backups are fairly inexpensive
- Data security
- Physical documents can’t be encrypted
- Digital files store the history of who accessed them and when
- Environmental concerns
- Less paper used means a potentially smaller carbon footprint
Disadvantages
- Initial time sink
- Time investment for switching an office from paper to paperless
- Time spent training employees on new practices and policies
- Scanning and destroying old physical documents
- Security concerns
- Securing data centers and servers
- Training employees on digital best practices to avoid data security breaches
- Finding services and apps to replace old practices
- Fax services (Fax.Live solves that problem)
- Digital asset management (document storage/repository)
Tools for Going Paperless
There are a lot of different apps and programs that replace old paper practices. These digital services can replace the paper aspects of your businesses.
Scanning
For iPhone users, DocScan.Live is a free, downloadable app that scans any document and converts it into a PDF, which you can then save to the cloud. See how DocScan works.
This app functions on smartphone devices with cameras. It’s also available on the Apple App Store. You position the document in front of your phone’s camera and the app will scan and convert it into a digital PDF, Word, PowerPoint, or even Excel file. This app is especially useful for digital-first offices that have employees who may not have a scanner at home.
This app is meant to integrate with OneDrive, a digital storage solution we’ll talk more about later.
Did you know that Google Drive also has a document scanner built into the app? The Google Drive app is available at the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. It can scan documents for uploading directly to Google Drive. This functionality has the same advantages as Microsoft Lens while being meant to work with Google Drive, which is a popular cloud storage solution.
Digital Storage
Cloud storage solutions are digital filing systems that let you organize and store your files online and access them from anywhere using your cloud account. Rather than having to go to a specific filing cabinet or even a specific computer, you can log into your account with a device and access your file.
Some cloud storage applications cost money, based on how much storage space you need, similar to a storage unit. This storage is calculated in bytes, which is related to the size of your files. Documents with images will be larger, while spreadsheets and text-based documents have very small file sizes. Digital storage is charged monthly at usually only around $10 to $15 per month for a business standard account.
Google Drive and Apple iCloud offer free storage. Apple builds iCloud storage into every device and gives 5 GB of storage. After that, it’s $.99/month for 50 GB, $2.99/month for 200 GB and $9.99/month for 2 TB. Google One offers 15 GB of storage with a personal account and monthly and annual plans that start at $1.99/month for 100 GB.
Usually used with Windows PCs but compatible with Macs, Microsoft OneDrive is built into most Windows 11 devices. Accessible with a Microsoft account, it’s intended to integrate seamlessly with PCs so you save your information on the cloud rather than on the physical hardware.
The advantage of this is that any Microsoft device that you log into will have your files accessible. OneDrive allows businesses to set up a collaborative organization drive where files can be shared by anyone in your organization with a Microsoft Account.
Cloud storage like OneDrive acts as your digital filing cabinet, allowing you to group documents in digital folders and file them away. You can password-lock them, control security, and collaborate with the rest of your organization. Microsoft OneDrive also integrates with Teams, if you use this to communicate with your organization.
Google Drive is a popular cloud storage solution that works with Google Accounts. If your organization uses Google Chrome as a web browser, most of your employees will probably already have a Google Account. Google Drive functions primarily in the web browser and allows you to store and share files with anyone who has an internet connection.
Google Drive has file organization tools like folders and lets you search for specific file names and types in the web browser. Google Drive is also consistently being updated with new features like AI-assisted tools and integrates with Google Meet.
Going Paperless at Home
If you’re also thinking about going paperless at your home or home office, think about how you plan to store your digital documents. If you scan and upload all of your docs to a local computer hard drive, it may take time, but ultimately saves you space. However, your information will now be tied to that one specific drive.
Hard drives fail. Usually, they last 5 years to 10 years (ESF, DiskGenius and Newegg), but they will eventually die. The average age of a drive that’s in constant use is less, 2 to 4 years, depending on numerous factors beyond the scope of our article. We recommend cloud storage because you have the redundancy of storage remotely. A service like OneDrive or Google will keep your files secured regardless of what device you’re using at home.
And so, we recommend going paperless with most of your documents. For example, switch to paperless billing on your electric, gas, and water bills. Get your bank statements digitally rather than physically. The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team suggests a 3-2-1 approach for important files and documents: Keep 3 copies (1 primary and 2 backups), store files on 2 media types, and store one copy offsite (outside your home or office).
Keep physical versions of important documents and have digital storage redundancy!
Going Paperless at Work
If you’re thinking of doing paperless at work or moving toward paperless, understand the risks and benefits while taking account of the time it’ll take to make the switch over. Slower months when there’s not a lot of business are the best times to make the switch.
Think about what aspects of your business you’ll change and who you’ll need to train on new practices. It’s also worth a discussion with your IT department about how you’ll store digital documents. IT can help you set up local servers that offer redundancy of data storage so you don’t risk losing valuable data.
IT will also establish the new security practices needed to keep digital information safe. Cloud storage solutions are excellent for sharing and accessing files, and it’s easy to log into a device and see all of an organization’s files. Additionally, you may want only digital documents to be accessible by some departments or permission levels within your organization.
All of this has to be taken into account while going paperless at work, as it’s not a process as simple as it may initially sound!
Paperless Fax
If your business frequently faxes documents or needs a digital fax solution, Fax.Live is the easiest online fax service that doesn’t require any apps, programs, or third party downloads. With Fax.Live, you can fax documents online entirely through your web browser.
Fax.Live is free to try. We take PDFs of your documents and transmit them via fax to your recipient. On the other end, your recipient won’t notice any difference with the document they receive. Fax.Live assigns your account a fax number so that you can not only send but also receive documents.
Fax.Live offers digital storage for documents you send and receive. Your organization can access all faxed files from the Fax.Live account. There’s also the option to set up multiple Fax.Live accounts for each department so you have dedicated fax numbers for billing, legal, and more.
It’s never been easier to switch to a paperless office, even if you need to use a fax machine. Fax machines can get expensive because of the dedicated phone line needed to run a fax machine. The machine itself also usually requires ink and paper to print out the documents you receive. Fax.Live is your paperless fax machine and the easiest solution for a paperless office.
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