Selling Your Boss on Paperless Conversion

For years, you have been drowning in a mountain of paperwork. You have lost count of the number of documents you have printed, written on, scanned, shredded, mailed, filed, and lost. In fact, you are pretty certain that your office has single-handedly leveled at least one rain forest in its demand for paper. Furthermore, you keep wondering who still conducts business in this manner now that it’s 2015. People have built flying cars and personal jet packs, and here you are conducting business by pressing a stick full of ink to processed wood pulp.

It is time to convert, but the budget is not entirely in your hands. You have to be able to justify the expense to your boss. So how do you sell them on a paperless conversion? The following tips should help make your case.

Remote Access

There are many reasons that an employee might not be able to make it into the office, but could still potentially work from home. Broken down vehicle, a missed flight at the end of a planned vacation, or going to a convention. Why should the company lose out on a day of productivity for that person when they are perfectly able to work?

By converting to a paperless office, you will gain the benefits of allowing employees remote access. This way, if they cannot make it to the office, they have the option to telecommute, allowing work to still get done. Your company can even begin offering occasional telecommuting as a job perk, increasing employee satisfaction and thus productivity.

Quickly Locate Files

When an urgent need for a document suddenly comes up but the document is nowhere to be found, it’s guaranteed that someone’s going to lose hours of productivity and everyone’s going to end up with a stress-induced migraine. Electronic filing, on the other hand, lets you set up tags, keywords, and other information to make it easy to locate. In fact, you can even run a search against words in the document. This way, even if a document is placed in the wrong folder, you can still locate it in a matter of seconds.

This translates to time saving and stress avoidance that, over time, will more than make up for the upfront cost of the software.

Environmental Friendliness

As mentioned previously: paper is not environmentally friendly. Paper comes from the destruction of trees that recycle the very air we breathe. While being environmentally friendly might not make much difference outside of tax breaks, it makes a huge difference in your company image. If the moral and ethical arguments are not enough to sway your CEO to go paperless, conspire with the CMO to highlight the image and marketing benefits of being an eco-friendly company.

Service Speed

Mailing letters and documents takes time, time that neither your customers nor your business has. Having everything stored digitally means you can transmit essential documentation in mere seconds. This also allows for rapid response times. Your boss might argue that the company fax machine can do the same thing. The costs in paper and ink required to maintain these fax machines along with the cost of a dedicated phone line, however, greatly exceed the costs of paperless conversion. Furthermore, if your company transmits a large amount of data on a regular basis, you save time and money by eliminating the wait for faxes to queue up.

Confidentiality

One of the best features of paperless software is how, properly configured, it can add layers of confidentiality that your company would otherwise lack. No longer do you have to worry about a customer’s private details ending up in unknown hands because an employee lost their briefcase on the subway. Having all of your documents stored on secure servers reduces the chance of unauthorized access due to human error.

Additionally, you can more easily compartmentalize information. Previously, this required spending money on keys for cabinet locks or door codes. Now you can tie information access to user logins, making it easy for people who need access to get access.

Conclusion

These are just a few of the major benefits of going paperless, and should be more than enough to convince any manager to approve the switch. Ultimately, convincing the CEO of the benefits of paperless conversion comes down to cost savings. Show them the ROI of paperless conversion, and you will almost certainly get a “yes.”