When I moved house recently, I had to schlep a bunch of folders and files with paper documents. Looking at the pile, I realised that actually finding a document I wanted would be a very time consuming activity and all those folders would take up lots of space. Surely there's a better way...
Going digital is in vogue these days and we've talked about how to transition to a paperless office. But it appears Australian small businesses still have a love affair with paper invoices and receipts, according to a survey by cloud accounting vendor Xero.
Although there are a lot of benefits to retaining documents digitally rather than paper, there's the question of legacy documents. At home, this can usually be easily managed but for larger enterprises, the costs of digitising paper documents may not make financial sense.
We live in an increasingly connected economy. Customers, colleagues and suppliers are spread across the globe -- all connected through information. Tied to this connectivity is an increasing demand for mobility and growing amounts of business information that needs to be shared, processed, stored, indexed and searched. As such, nearly 80 per cent of companies are looking at using less paper and digitising parts (or even all) of their business.
Workplace technology has come a long way and today we can easily throw our work documents into the cloud and access them anywhere through computers, tablets and smartphones with crystal clear displays. Yet despite all the technological advancements that are able to free us from the shackles of printing out documents, the Paperless Office sounds like a mythical unicorn that continues to elude businesses big and small. Fear not, as we have some advice to free yourself from the shackles of paper.
