The Benefits of Digital Workflows for SMBS

There’s a reason large corporations are moving to digital workflows: paper is costing you money, and a lot of it. As a small business owner, you need to carefully monitor your resources to stay competitive, but many SMBs are hesitating to go paperless. Making the switch could have dramatic, positive, effects on your business.

The True Costs of Paper

It can be easy to lose track of paper costs. With the average office worker printing over 10,000 sheets worth of paper per year, costs add up quickly but invisibly. With nearly half of all paper ended up in the recycle bin within days, and printed forms becoming outdated within weeks, much of your printing costs are wasted.

Paper costs money to store – on average, a filing cabinet will cost $1,500 per year to store and maintain. Paper also costs money to manage, as employees spend six hours per week on average hunting for lost or misplaced documents.

Paper is also fragile. Losing documents to a fire, flood or other event could devastate your business. As many as 70% of businesses cannot recover from such a loss.

Digital Saves Time and Money

Switching to digital workflows can have a dramatic effect on your productivity and costs, and these benefits are magnified for SMBs. Even with a limited number of employees, you can do more work when less time is wasted filing and searching for documents. Digital workflows allow you to index your documents as they are stored, making searching for them as easy as typing in a keyword.

Reducing your paper use reduces your need to store documents onsite. By storing items in the cloud, you increase security. Cloud access allows for employees to do work on the go, collaborate on documents efficiently, and make meetings faster and more productive.

Many SMBs are hesitant to take the leap to digital workflows, afraid the investment won’t pay off. However, most businesses see their investment paid off within the first 18 months. Even starting with just a few areas, such as human resources and accounting, can help you reap the rewards of digital workflows.

Digital is the wave of the future and it’s easy to see why. By increasing productivity and reducing costs, digital workflows can help your SMB thrive.

Related blog:

5 Ways to Significantly Reduce Paper Usage in the Workplace