It’s estimated that one in five small British businesses still rely on paper. 

If your organisation still has filing cabinets full of folders containing printed documents, you’re clearly not alone, but the benefits of digitising such content can no longer be ignored. 

1) It saves money

Paper and printer consumables are accumulatively expensive. They also require space within offices, thus adding to their cost.

By digitising documents and storing them in the cloud, you’ll need less office space and it’s possible to enjoy a significantly reduced spend on printer ink and paper.

2) It saves time

Digitising documents was once a fairly painful process that involved time-consuming scanning and uploading via slow internet connections.

Not any more. Files can be quickly captured digitally and, once stored in the cloud, accessed quickly via intuitive, smart search tools.

Many documents are created digitally in the first place and adding these documents to secure, sharable online spaces saves time and effort. 

3) It improves collaboration

There’s nothing worse than working on a team project from home only to realise that a key piece of information is contained solely on a printed document… which is back at the office.

With digitised content, teams can collaborate more easily by sharing documents and working on them simultaneously. Information can spread effortlessly and securely across the world, bringing employees, contractors and freelancers together.

4) It improves data security

Paper records are inherently insecure. One gust of wind, and a highly confidential document can be sent flying out of the window (or left on the train as past events show).

Despite the prevalence of cybercrime, with the right security restrictions in place, cloud-based documents can be kept away from prying eyes.

Remember - you can’t password-protect a printed file.

Putting digitised data to work

Once you’ve decided to move your documentation to the cloud, you’ll need to ready your business for digital transformation: 

• Decide where to store it. There’s now an abundance of cloud service to choose from but it’s important to pick the one that best suits your organisation. Consider what user permissions can be set, how easy it is to share the documents and how secure the service is.
• Tool up. For digitisation to be a strategy rather than a flash-in-the-pan, you need to be ready to move documents to the cloud from anywhere. Invest in tools that enable you to scan and store data no matter where staff happen to be located.
• Simplify data imports. Consider investing in web capture software to simplify the task of moving data between applications - this might mean moving from an offline tool to a similar online tool that captures data as you work.
• Dispose of digitised docs. Once scanned into the digital realm, make sure you have a process in place to destroy original documents. Shredding them in-house is best.

Few solutions can save businesses time and money like digitisation. It is a change that can affect everyone in the business across all departments and there is nothing stopping you from starting your journey to digital transformation today.