What is Paperless Office?

Every single employee consumes about 10,000 sheets of paper every year!

U.S offices use 12.1 trillion sheets of paper a year.

The average American office worker uses an average of 10,000 sheets of office paper per year.

That’s huge. It's time to break free from this outdated habit and embrace digital solutions. Apart from environmental factors, going paperless improves efficiency and reduces workload of employees. It helps the employees to save time managing paper documents and invest their time in doing something productive for the organization.

Read on to learn what a paperless office is, how to create implement it, its benefits, and its challenges.

What Is A Paperless Office?

A paperless office is one where digitized documents replace paper documents. But, of course, there are many organizations that prefer paper documents, so they can't rely entirely on digitized documents. But they can gradually reduce the paper documents to progress towards a paperless office.

The process of moving towards a paperless office involves digitizing the documents and storing them in a central location so that they can be accessed easily and quickly. Moreover, it saves a lot of space and time for the employees to look for paper documents manually. Moreover, going paperless helps the organization to stay competitive in the industry and achieve great heights.

Benefits Of A Paperless Office

Maintain Confidentiality

Paper documents are hard to maintain and pose a security risk for the company. It could be damage, theft, etc. Thus there is a need to go paperless to maintain the organization's security and confidentiality. With the help of a paperless office, all the company's important information can be stored in a digital secure cloud storage with utmost security so next time there would not be any risk of losing or damaging the documents.

Improving Business Processes

A paperless office helps to conduct all the processes quickly and easily, boosting productivity and leading the company to great heights. If the information is stored in paper documents, employees will find it hard to work on the tasks together, but with the help of digitized documents, they can collaborate and complete the tasks as soon as possible.

Facilitated Access To Documents

A paperless office enables the employees in the organization to view and access documents with just one click. This process is as simple as possible and does not use up much time for the employees searching for the paper files.

Cost-Effectiveness

Another benefit of going paperless is that maintaining paper documents is very costly. But with the help of a document management system, all these processes of managing the files in the digitized format become easy and under budget.

How To Create A Paperless Office?

To create a paperless office, follow the following steps.

Paperless Document Management

This step involves creating, storing, and managing all the documents digitally. You can accomplish this by:

Using Document Scanning Tools

With the help of document scanning tools, the organization can scan documents and store them in one place. This is the best way to go paperless, and it is also very convenient as the documents and files can be shared and accessed whenever required.

Online Faxing Services

Online faxing service is another way to go paperless as it helps you to send and receive faxes quickly, and you can even store them in a digital format.

Document Management Solution

Using a document management system helps the users to store all the files and documents in a single place which helps all the organizations maintain security.

Digitize Business Functions With Intelligent Automation Software

Many business functions, such as tracking orders, document signatures, etc., require paperwork to be maintained. To go paperless, you need intelligent automation platform to manage all these business functions, such as:

Accounting Automation Software

With the help of accounting automation software, you will be able to manage and track all your financial processes easily and securely. This helps you to manage the finances digitally and thus eliminating the use of papers to record them.

E-Signature Services

E-signature services help organizations maintain the signatures of employees as well as clients digitally and thus reducing the use of paper.

Expense-Tracking Apps

Expense-tracking apps enable users to manage and track expenses in real time. Using a receipt scanner and expense management software helps organizations digitize their employee reimbursement processes.

Digital Time And Attendance Systems

Recording the employees' attendance on paper can be very time-consuming. However, with the help of digital time and attendance systems, you can track their attendance digitally, thus moving a step forward in going paperless.

Adopt Paperless Billing

Another way to go paperless involves adopting a paperless billing system. This process can be achieved by involving the clients and other firms to agree to use paperless bills. Then, you can ask for paperless receipts and scan them to feed into your system. In this way, you will be able to maintain all the bills in one place, which you can access whenever there is a need.

Go For Cloud-Based Document Backup

Another way a company can go paperless involves using cloud-based document backup. It is one of the easiest and quickest ways to store, access, and share data. Not only this, but all the data can be stored in a single place and has a backup, so if any data is damaged, the company could have a backup to it.

It helps the organization not only be paperless but also broaden the reach of the company. In addition, it helps the workers access and work on the files from home as well, and it will further enhance the organization's productivity.

Challenges Of A Paperless Office

A paperless office is not free from any criticisms. There are some issues that every organization faces while the transition process from paper documents to paperless documents. It involves changing how employees work as they are equipped with working or maintaining records on paper. So they need to be trained to operate the new software that stores the documents digitally. Another problem while going paperless involves VPN technology. Organizations are reluctant to have paperless offices because the organization needs to adapt this technology to operate the digital documents.

Nanonets - Move towards a paperless office

Nanonets’ leading OCR software digitizes all business paper documents into searchable digitized documents within seconds. Along with the workflow automation capabilities, it can automate manual processes like approvals,

Nanonets is an easy-to-use software that you can start using from day 1. It’s easy to set up and intuitive to use. Nanonets provides many benefits that go above and beyond traditional document scanning software, which are included in the platform.

Nanonets has an advanced OCR API that extracts data from unstructured documents, images, handwritten notes, and blurry scanned documents with 95% accuracy. It also integrates with 5000+ applications via API and Zapier so that you can sync data with your business applications in real-time.

Nanonets offers:

• 14-day free trial
• A forever-free plan
• Free migration assistance
• 24x7 live support
• Training support
• Whitelabel OCR & Accounts payable solution
• Customization options
• Document Annotation support
• Professional services

Apart from these, here are three reasons why Nanonets is an excellent catch for businesses looking to automate their manual processes:

• Workflow Automation - Nanonets’ in-built no-code workflows can automate manual processes like approvals, document processing, vendor checks, PDF lookup, data matching, and more.
• Document Management - Nanonets’ can be used for every step of the document management journey. It can automatically capture documents and extract data from documents, digitization, annotation, and storage.
• Global Payments - You can use Nanonets to process international payments via wire transfer and ACH without leaving the platform. Pay your vendors, invoices, and employees from the venue on time.

Nanonets offers a feature-packed platform to automate everything from complex financial processes to routine data entry. With seamless integrations, no-code platform, and templates, Nanonets is perfect for businesses looking to eliminate manual intervention in business processes.