If your organization has cabinets full of unorganized paper files, faxes, invoices, customer contracts, and other reports, you should strongly consider making the switch to paperless.
Paper documents and filing cabinets have been the way to organize information and documents for decades. But that doesn't mean it's the best option for businesses.
Nowadays, many organizations are transitioning from physical documents to electronic document management systems with the hopes of building a paperless office.
In fact, making paperless possible for your organization isn't as hard as you might consider it to be. And by the end of this guide, you'll have a better understanding of making paperless possible for your organization.
Here's what we'll cover:
- Why go paperless?
- What A Paperless Organization Looks Like For Operations Teams
- How Going Paperless Works Practically
- Using Inkit As An Automated Document Management Software For Making Paperless Possible
Why Go Paperless?
While the paperless concept itself is nothing new, most business owners cannot look past its eco-friendly benefits.
This in itself is not a bad thing, as being pragmatic gets the job done. However, there are more practical benefits other than eco-friendly prospects that going paperless brings to the table.
The rapid development of technology has made transitioning to paperless even easier than ever before too.
Improved security, increased work efficiency, and an optimized workflow are but a few benefits that can help drive value in your organization, should you go paperless.
Let’s explore these benefits quickly before talking about the practical steps you can take to go paperless.
Improved security
Traditional paper-infused frameworks offer little to no security assurance compared to their paperless counterparts.
The physical paper could be a potential source of vulnerability for your company. Employees can easily misfile or misplace sensitive paperwork, potentially costing your company its credibility as perceived by customers.
According to Gartner Research, on average, it costs American companies $120 to find a misfiled paper document. If the document was not found, however, it costs around $220 to reproduce it.
The paperless initiative provides a robust collection of relevant security solutions. These solutions range from basic content control to more advanced encryption-grade security protocols.
Additionally, a document management system helps in all steps of your document management lifecycle system.

Optimized workflow
Extreme cases of paper clutter in your operations workflow can be detrimental to your company.
Time otherwise spent on value-added tasks is diverted to completing repetitive and tedious tasks like filing, organizing, and tracking paperwork.
Going paperless essentially means you get rid of these problems.
Paperless technology - electronic document and record management system (EDRMS) and automated document generation offer a digitized version of services that you can assess in just one click.
Reduced costs
As you might already know, going paperless ensures that your company saves costs incurred on paper purchase and utility (printing - ink, postage, toner, physical storage)
However, you might not know or easily overlook the comprehensive cost reduction that going paperless will feature.
The more efficient and optimized workflow features will reflect your company's cost savings. This is because employees are now enabled to focus on value-driving tasks.
Additional benefits that could drive operational cost reduction in your company include savings from reduced office space.
Here’s what paper-based management looks like by the numbers:
- Companies spend around $20 to file and store paper documents (Ademero, 2020).
- Businesses waste around $20,000 on document issues (Nitro, 2020).
- Workers spend around 18 minutes looking for documents, and on average, 50% of their time creating and preparing documents (Nitro, 2020, Tech Crunchies, 2018).

Easier information access
Transitioning to a paperless system enables you and your company employees to access relevant and important information remotely - from anywhere and at any time.
Moreover, easy, almost instantaneous access to relevant information significantly improves customer experience.
Digitization of your company's framework will ensure the easy collation of relevant user data. And this data can be used to develop personalized and targeted campaigns tailored to match customers' preferences.
Safe document regulations and compliance
Businesses are responsible for their customers' information.
Regulations and compliance guidelines are put in place by regulatory bodies like HIPPA and SOX to ensure that companies safeguard proprietary and customer data with integrity.

It is easier to be regulations compliant when your company incorporates document management systems.
Ensuring compliance in a paper-based system is complicated. A neglected file or a misfiled paperwork could easily cause your company to be non-compliant.
The advanced security and electronic safeguard measures featured in a paperless system ensure full autonomy on what content is made available and to whom.
You can also automate HIPAA-compliant document archival or deletions, based on your data lifecycle.
One of the biggest problems with secure data deletion is knowing what to destroy, when, and who’s responsible for it. With an automated document management system, this becomes a breeze.
See how Inkit helps healthcare organizations for more practical info on this.
Now, let’s take a look at what making paperless possible is like for business teams.
What A Paperless Organization Looks Like For Operations Teams
A paperless organization digitizes most of its business processes and operations.
This means that in the organizational workflow, any process that utilizes paper will be automated to use electronic document formats from the previous hardcopy format.
To make this a reality, a paperless organization uses different tools, from the simplest note-taking applications to more advanced ones like document generation software.
The importance of going paperless cannot be overstated, especially for operations teams in an organization.
An ideal operations team working in a paperless environment completes its workload via a series of automated software services.
- Email, spreadsheet, and word processing for efficient handling of orders and service delivery.
- Accounting software to securely handle payments and correctly document transactions.
- Digital databases to securely aggregate relevant and important customer data, purchase requests, etc., for easy access.
- Automated document generation for converting physical hard copies of information to a processable digital format.
- Communication and sharing tools for communication and collaboration among employees and team members.
- Project management software for planning and tracking work progress, syncing orders and deliveries, managing production rhythms, etc.
There are various tools (cloud-based or otherwise) that provide these required automation and digitization services, with each tool providing an extensive range of innovative solutions.