With each year that passes us by, paper filing systems are becoming more and more outdated. Scanning on site and on site scanning services have become more and more popular and more people – and more companies – choose to go through with the process of scanning on site in order to move away from the world of paper filing. After all, paper filing systems are far from efficient and the ability of paper filing systems to meet the needs of everyone who works with them is quickly fading.
After all, it has been found that your typical paper filing system will actually waste quite a bit of time in the long run. It takes as many as five minutes to find a document when using a paper filing system, as the person looking for the document will need to not only walk to the place where the documents are kept, but to hunt through them for the right one and then walk back to their desk or area of work. With a digital filing system, pulling up the right document is more likely than not to take mere seconds and can be done right at the place of work, no moving around required. The process of faxing is a lengthy one as well, taking as many as eight minutes to send a single fax, whereas emailing a document takes only a fraction of that time.
And paper filing systems are hugely costly as well. Take just one fax machine, a necessary product when a paper filing system is in place. This fax machine will cost more than $6,000 to run over the course of just one year. And in larger offices and workspaces, it is not unlikely for more than one fax machine to be in use.
Even when everything goes smoothly, filing a document using a paper filing system can be quite expensive, costing as much as $20 for each and every document that needs to be filed. When documents are lost as misplaced, as happens to more than 10% of documents in total, the cost rises quite significantly. Of the 3% or so misplaced documents seen over the course of a year, the typical misplaced document will cost an additional $120 in manpower to find it and and refile it. A lost document – as is the fact of as many as 7.5% of all paper documents – costs as much as $220 in labor to replace.
And avoiding the process of scanning on site and document conversion services actually winds up wasting a good deal of paper. After all, the United States currently goes through as many as four trillion sheets of paper over the course of just one single year. And this amount is growing, too, sometimes by as much as 16% per year. Not only is this a truly tremendous waste of money, but it is something that is likely to be hugely bad for our planet as well, making the process of scanning on site and other such onsite document scanning all the more appealing for companies all throughout the United States.
Fortunately, going through the process of scanning on site and even hiring a service for large format scanning can really pay off in the long run – even if the process of scanning on site is tedious in the moment. For instance, efficiency will improve quite considerably, as it has been found that even documents in need of signing will be signed as much as 80% faster when electronic signing methods are utilized instead of physical ones on a paper document.
And emailing is, of course, a quick and efficient way to communicate information, oftentimes very necessary and important information, at that. With this information, important news can be conveyed very quickly, something that is not necessarily possible with a fax machine, especially when there is only one fax machine able to be used per office. Of course, emailing back and forth is far less expensive than owning and maintaining a fax machine as well.