Five Impediments to a Paperless Office

The benefits of a paperless office are well known and include more efficient processes, fewer file cabinets, and massive cost-savings from removing the reams from your office supplies purchases. It makes sense for all types of businesses to consider going paperless, especially in the technological world.

Document management systems (DMS) and cloud-based productivity software like Microsoft Office 365 are easy ways for you to significantly cut down paper usage. But there are challenges with implementing company-wide software solutions in order to have a paperless office that you may not know.

Stubborn employees

Employees can be resistant to change, and taking away the familiarity and simplicity of your paper-centric processes may be difficult for them to give up.

Employees need to be shown how much easier and more efficient a paperless office is. This means they must be taught how to use DMS features such as workflow automation, document capture, and smart search, and learn how these features eliminate a slew of your current tedious, time-consuming processes.

Lack of training

Even if you automate things like AP workflows and document retrieval with DMS, human error like mislabeling files, failing to scan documents properly, or sending records to the wrong person is inevitable.

A brisk training session or two is the best way to eliminate human errors. Learning how DMS works takes a bit of time, which is why you should give even experienced staff a refresher course once or twice a year.

If your teams are still having issues adapting to the paperless paradigm after a few training sessions, then consider a more user-friendly DMS like PairSoft.

Cybersecurity risks

When paper documents are digitized and stored in servers, they’re vulnerable to being infected by ransomware, spyware, and many other kinds of malware. These viruses can cost you a lot of money in data loss, damage your company’s reputation, and potentially put you out of business.

You can prevent all this with firewalls, antivirus software, and encryption tools. The first two detect malware and remove it before it can corrupt your data. Encryption tools will transform your data into indecipherable code that can’t be read or tampered with by unauthorized users.

Storing your data in offsite cloud servers also helps. This way, if hackers were to somehow infect your servers, you’ll still have clean versions of your files that can be retrieved and restored via the internet from any device.

IT costs

Paperless offices are less expensive, but there are still some operational costs you have to consider. If you decide to store your data on premises, you’ll have to purchase the servers and the DMS software.

If you decide to move your data to a cloud-based DMS, PairSoft is an excellent option. It will be installed, monitored, and maintained by a team of experts who will provide all the hardware, software, and support necessary for a successful paperless business, all for a monthly subscription fee.

Document scanning

The transition to a paperless office can take a bit of time when you have to digitize stacks of paper documents. The first thing you have to do is to sort through file cabinets and dispose of outdated material you no longer need. Next, you’ll need to gather all the remaining files and prep them for scanning. After they’ve been scanned into the DMS you’ll need to organize them and set access restrictions for highly sensitive records. This entire process can take several days if not weeks depending on how much paper you have to scan.

Going paperless doesn’t take overnight, but the hard work you put in will be worth it. Read our whitepaper: Top 9 reasons to go paperless to find out more.