5 Ways to Move Your Company to Paperless Operations

By taking your company paperless, you can significantly contribute to the health and longevity of our planet, as well as reduce your own expenses. Not to mention, you will reduce the amount of unnecessary clutter around your offices, and step into the digital future.

Let’s take a look at five ways you can take your company paperless.

Do Paperless Meetings

Company meetings involve a lot of paper – presentations, minutes, everyone’s individual notes amount to an excessive amount of waste.

Instead of printing out your presentation’s key points and circling them around to let everyone write their own notes, go for a virtual presentation, which you can later share with all the participants. You can also select a team member to take notes on a laptop during the meeting and share the file with everyone else.

Educate your staff on the importance of going paperless, and why they shouldn’t use notepads at meetings either. Some might have a more difficult time adjusting to this new mode of operation, but with a bit of education and guidance, they’ll be able to overcome the initial pushback.

Stop Sending Physical Mail

A lot of companies are already cutting down on the amount of mail they send, choosing to do most of their communication via email. However, there are still things you can do to cut down on your paper trail even further:

• Opt for virtual holiday and other celebratory cards instead of sending them through the mail.
• Create digital brochures and catalogs instead of printed ones.
• Do paperless billing and invoicing. Ask all the companies sending their bills and invoices to you to do it digitally, and do the same for your own customers.
• Always use electronic calendars instead of physical ones. There are countless apps available that can be synced across all your devices, making sure you stay on schedule.

Scan All of Your Existing Paperwork

You likely already have an extensive paper archive in the office – which you don’t quite want to throw out.

Before you recycle all of your company’s documents, turn them digital either with a scanner (which will take more time, but the quality will be much better) or via a phone app that can turn images into PDFs. Make sure you shred any sensitive documentation before recycling it, as you don’t want to jeopardize your company’s security.

The same goes for all of your internal manuals and processes. You don’t have to keep them in paper format – you can scan all of them and store them on the cloud, ensuring the right people have the right access.

When going digital, make sure you invest a fair amount of time, effort, and resources in security. Depending on whether you store your data locally or remotely, you’ll need to rely on secure servers, firewalls, and other security measures.

Use E-signatures for All of Your Documents

Signing contracts and agreements no longer has to involve printing out a whole host of documents for you to sign. Instead, you can move to electronic signatures, both for your contracts and for your credit card transactions through different POS systems.

E-signatures are completely legally binding. Plus, the fact that you can sign your documents on practically any device and don’t have to visit a physical store or office in order to do that makes them incredibly practical.

You can ask your clients to do the same, saving even more paper in the process.

Digitize All of Your Forms and Workflows

Forms on Fire can help you take all of your paper forms digital, and enable you to use a phone or a tablet for staying on top of your workload, as opposed to pen and paper. We offer plenty of integrations to ensure you don’t have to worry about accessing data you already have stored somewhere else.

From facts and figures to Google maps images, you can work with any set of data you already have access to, wherever you are, at any time.

We also provide unique mobile forms solutions that allow you to collect and send data online and offline, using our no-code mobile form designer on any device of your choosing.

To Sum It All Up

Going paperless is certainly the way of the future, and all of us need to embrace it as something normal rather than something we have yet to adapt and get used to. Hopefully, our five suggestions will help you make the transition more smoothly and figure out the most hassle-free way to eliminate all of that unnecessary paper from your offices.