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According to Corp! Magazine, “It costs an organization an average of $20 to file a document, $120 to find a misplaced document, and $220 to reproduce a lost document.” Most digital filing systems have a built-in search function, which lets you find a file in seconds - even if it’s misplaced, usually. You don’t want to waste precious minutes rifling through stacks of paper. Obviously, an activity that takes up so much time comes with significant costs. Timeįiling, sorting, and locating documents in a physical filing system can be a herculean task. Which brings us to the ways going paperless will save you.
#BENEFITS OF GOING PAPERLESS AT HOME ARCHIVE#
Large filing cabinets can fill valuable floor space in an office and, unless you have a full-time librarian on staff, locating a single file from the archive can be arduous. If they are kept, all those documents have to be stored somewhere. Printing is only one of many costs associated with paper.
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Most printer paper is a one-use item, glanced at and instantly tossed. The sad fact is that most of what you print at work – whether handouts, minutes, reports, or statements – goes straight into the trash anyway. Toner is another expensive budget item, costing hundreds of dollars per employee on average. The average office worker uses about $80 worth of paper every year, and the lifecycle cost of that paper (copying, delivery, handling, storage, retrieval) is far higher. Going Paperless Can Help You Save… Moneyįrom a business standpoint, the best reason for going paperless is to save money. I’ll give you some of those arguments, then outline some strategies and services you can use if you decide to go paper-free. There are some excellent arguments for going paperless-guilt just isn’t one of them. That’s not to say that the paperless office is a misguided dream. Coal-mining has come a long way in the past decades, but it is still far more risky, environmentally speaking, than harvesting trees. Digital work relies completely on electricity, more than a quarter of which is produced by coal in the United States. And it’s a myth that digital work is more environmentally friendly than paperwork. Recycling paper is an excellent practice, but mostly because it saves landfill space – not trees. Currently, Americans plant more trees than we harvest, thanks primarily to the efforts of lumber and paper companies, who have a strong economic incentive to grow healthy forests.
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Well, you shouldn’t be ashamed of using paper. You watched that TED talk about drying your hands with a single paper towel and now you’re ashamed if you don’t leave the restroom with your palms still slightly damp. Guilt nags you for the overflowing filing cabinet jammed in the corner. You hear stories of how Americans use more paper than people in the rest of the world.
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