Written by Dominic Acito.
Whether you are the head your company’s finance department or just an employee trying to make the company more efficient, one place you can eliminate some waste is by cutting back on the excessive use of paper, especially in your finance department. Cutting back on paper usage has many benefits from cost savings to possible productivity boosts. Let’s take a look at how this can benefit your company.
Save Money on Paper and Printer Ink
This is probably the most obvious way you can see instant savings. Printer paper and printer ink can really add up and get to be quite expensive. Depending on how much printing you do, you may be able to save your company thousands of dollars over the course of a year. One more consideration is that by printing less, you are decreasing the wear and tear on your expensive printers and copiers. By printing less, you may be able to get a few extra years out of these devices.
Increase Productivity
If you are constantly printing and storing documents in file cabinets and folders, it is going to take some time retrieving these documents. In the finance department, you are constantly retrieving different reports, files, and more. By using digital versions of these files, you can really save yourself a ton of time over the course of the day. Let’s say you only work with 30 reports that day. If it takes you a minute or two to retrieve this hard copy, then that adds up to 30-60 minutes of time just retrieving files. With a well-organized digital filing system, you are surely going to find these reports much faster, especially since you can simply use the search feature when you misplace a digital document.
Better Historical Reports and Documents
Let’s face it; losing a physical document happens all the time in the work place. If your IT team is doing its job well, they are constantly making backups of your emails, your company’s intranet, and any documents on your companies servers. With all the places these documents are stored and backed up, it is much harder to lose critical reports, especially really old ones.
A few Tips for Decreasing Paper Usage
Now that you are convinced that you need to cut back on your paper usage, you may be wondering how you can go about it. First of all, one great way to save paper is to only print something when you really have to. Most employees will be on board with this. The key is to clearly lay it out as a goal for the department or company as a whole. Next, when you are printing stuff that isn’t super critical, try to reuse the back side of the paper. This won’t save any ink, but it will save paper. One more tip along these lines is to print using lower quality settings when printing reports that aren’t super critical. One last tip is to go electronic with any reports or documents that you can. Do you send any monthly or weekly reports? Can you digitalize these and send via email?
Author Bio: Dominic Acito is the founder and editor of domstechblog.com. He brings a background as a software engineer and as a high level super user to the Blogging world.