A lot of businesses are trying to go paperless and turn towards digitalization for meeting all their requirements. It’s an understandable move given that it takes a lot of effort to maintain paper documents, locate an important folder, and so on. Plus, one cannot ignore the negative impact it has on the environment considering the mass paper production of 300 million tons every year.
Here are some ways in which you can lead your small business to become paperless:
- Copy documents with scanners and scanner apps.
When deciding to go paperless, the first thing you’ll need to think about is what you are going to do with the dozens of paper documents that you’ve already amassed. The solution is quite simple.
You can scan all of these documents and store them digitally on a cloud-based service. This will allow you to include all of your old documents in the same digital storage as the new ones. After scanning them, you can either keep the documents in the place they were stored or shred and dispose them, whatever feels right to you.
- Store Documents on the Cloud
Storing documents and records physically, in the paper form, is quite difficult as you will have to dedicate space for it and with time, this space would need to be increased. You can easily avoid this problem by storing all of your documents digitally.
You can create documents online and store them on secure servers without having to sacrifice any physical space in your working area. It will also become much easier for you to maintain backups and share the documents with employees when needed. There are many cloud-based services that allow you to do so.
- Use Digital Visual Aids in Meetings
Whenever you have a meeting, you should create graphs and other informative aids for the things you want to say, digitally rather than printing them out on paper. You can easily display these digital aids to all of the other members in the meeting and you can also share it with anyone after you are done.
This will reduce your trouble of having to print out a number of copies of the same thing just so that others can refer to it.
- Communicate digitally
Instead of putting up flyers all over the place to remind your employees of a meeting or of some event that is coming up, you can simply set a reminder on a shared digital calendar.
You should send them emails regarding different issues rather than giving messages via paper notices. This saves a lot of time and will also ensure that the person you’re sending the reminder or message to, receives it in time. It’ll also become easier for others to respond to you in a shorter period of time.
- Use e-signatures on documents
Usually, when you have to sign on some documents, you would have to print out all of its pages. That’s a lot of wasted paper just for a single signature. You should add an e-signature to your device. This way, you won’t have to print out documents you need to sign and save your ink cost. E-signatures are as legally binding as the physical ones so you needn’t worry about anything.
- Use a Digital Business Card
As essential paper business cards are to businesses, they are pretty expensive and take up a lot of storage space. You can easily avoid using them by creating a digital business card for yourself. There are a number of softwares using which you can design one.
Digital cards are much more useful than the paper ones as they can be shared at any moment to anyone all over the world with access to the internet. Digital business cards also grab the attention of the receiver and they will be much more likely to get in touch with you.
The transition from using a lot of papers every day to becoming paperless will be a gradual process and it will take some time. But ultimately, it’ll benefit your business as you will be able to save a lot of overhead charges and storage space. Not just that, you’ll also be doing a great favour to the environment by reducing your use of paper.