Going Paperless – From The Individual To The Business

By Author: Donald Nason
Total Articles: 48
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Last week I decided to open a new gym membership.”No problem,” they said, “just bring some proof of identity – driving licence and a utility bill will do.”

So, no problem, I thought, until looking through my filing cabinet I realised I didn’t have a utility bill – not a physical piece of paper I could actually pick up and take down to the gym, because I’ve opted to go paperless, and get my monthly bills and quarterly statements by email.

Of course I had the option of going into my electronic filing system and printing a bill. It was defeating the object as far as ‘going paperless’ was concerned – but in this instance did mean I’d be able to join my gym.

One of the main reasons influencing my decision to go paperless was the green issue – according to The Paperless Project the average person uses 100 yards of trees each year – but on my way to the gym I thought of all the other benefits it brought.

I save time – no making out cheques, filling in remittance forms, searching for stamps and traipsing down to the post office.

And I save money – postage, petrol, ...
... plus the discount I get from the electricity and water companies, etc, for going paperless and who presumably save money on their paper (bill plus two sets of envelopes) and printing expenses, postage and associated staff processing costs.

We’ve recently posted a number of blogs focusing on the growing move of businesses and organisations to ‘paperless’ processing , such as, E-invoicing Adoption on the Rise, and eForms – an increasing trend.

Secretary of State for Health Jeremy Hunt said in his speech of 16 January 2013, “So today I am setting a new ambition for the NHS. I want it to become paperless by 2018. The most modern digital health service in the world.”

The European Union ’s A Digital Agenda for Europe has a target of the year 2020 for e-invoicing to have been adopted as the most widely used invoicing method across Europe, with an interim goal of electronic invoicing to have become mandatory for all public procurement by 2016.

The Paperless Project also has some interesting statistics about businesses and documents. They reckon that over 70 percent of businesses would fail within three weeks if fire or flood destroyed their paper-based records.

On a day-to-day basis, they point to an average document search time of 18 minutes, and an employee typically spending 30– 40 percent of work-time searching through emails, paper documents, shared hard disks and filing cabinets for specific pieces of information.

In addition, they believe that on average documents are copied between nine and 11 times – and that the larger organisations lose a document every 12 seconds, and that at any one moment, between 3 and 5 percent of an organization’s files are either lost or ‘misplaced’.

Automating not only addresses these issues but brings a host of other benefits – reduced data entry and document storage costs; staff more productive, able to focus on more strategic tasks; better relationships with suppliers and customers; improved visibility and control; streamlined processing, and far quicker cycle times.

By removing paper and manual processing businesses and organisations reduce cost, improve efficiency, enhance business control and achieve legal compliance.

To return to my story, though, - I told them at the gym that I’d had difficulty in finding a paper utility bill. They said I wasn’t the first to mention that and they were looking into changing their joining procedure.

Oh, and don’t get me wrong, I love getting post – birthday cards, invitations, polished Basildon Bond missives in elegant longhand – bills, though, I can do without.