What Are the Benefits of a Paperless Workplace?

Access to Documents Anywhere

• With paper in a filing cabinet, a person must be in the office to access the document, or he must take the file with him. A paperless office allows workers to access documents from anyplace that has a computer connection, including a smart phone. This allows employees to be more efficient when working in remote areas.

Documents Can be Easily Located

• Part of establishing a paperless office is to determine how the files will be named. Then, you can easily locate a file by filename. If you don't know the filename, you can perform a search for certain keywords in the document and locate it that way. In a business that deals with account numbers or assigns tracking numbers to documents, documents can be searched and easily retrieved by these numbers . A document can be referenced by a name or a city of residence without having different files for each category.

Safer and More Secure Documents

• Important documents in a filing cabinet could be lost forever in a fire or some other disaster. Paperless documents stored electronically can be easily backed up. The backup can be offsite and away from your office. With backed up documents, you can be up and quickly running again. Destruction of paper documents could mean the destruction of your business and source of income. With correct security measures, it is more difficult for someone to break into electronic files and steal them than to break into an office and steal confidential customer or client information.

Considerations

• Use at least two backups of your documents, with one offsite. Use professional software made for an office to create your paperless documents. Have a process in place to archive older electronic documents and name them in a recognizable way, perhaps incorporating the creation date as part of the name. Always encrypt sensitive data to protect it. However, keep paper copies of professional licenses and certain signed documents.