If your company is growing in paper forms and paper documents, you’re wasting thousands of dollars a year. Costs for rekeying, filing, storage, real estate, and related costs — not to mention the many more thousands per employee thanks to lost productivity. And you’re also missing out on the competitive advantage you might uncover thanks to the power of real-time digital documents and data. Data shows that when companies go paperless, they also save money.
So concludes a wide variety of studies and experts. Moving to a paperless office is easier than you might think. You can quickly and affordably build mobile forms that do data collection. You can reap the benefits of going paperless even if you don’t have a high-powered development team or a sophisticated document management system.
Let's explore how you can eliminate paper forms and create digital forms for your field workers.
Benefits of Going Paperless
Cost Analysis of Paper and Digital Forms by Repsly explains that one surprisingly high cost of paper forms and paper files is office space.. It estimates that storage space and filing cabinets required for the forms of field reps comes to $2,165. That’s relatively small compared to the loss of productivity and wasted time caused by paper.
The SBE Council reports that 11 hours of field rep time and 6 hours of business owner time is spent filling out and managing paper forms each week. This time is spent on things such as recording mileage logs, organizing paper forms, and filling out timesheets. That’s $4,147 per year that each field rep spends on administrative work.
Then there are the costs of printers — and particularly, supporting and maintaining them. A study by Xerox found that for every dollar spent on printers, $9.40 is spent on IT support, administrative management and service. If you purchase a printer for $250 for printing forms, you’ll spend an additional $2,350 on additional printer costs.
Go Paperless to Save Money and Office Space
Ron Cogburn, CEO of Exela Technologies sums up the costs of paper forms and the benefits of digital forms this way in a Forbes blog post:
“Paper-based forms, records, and other workflows move slowly, take up a lot of space and require a lot of labor to manage. On the other hand, these same documents can be scanned, and the data within them can be extracted, indexed, organized and securely stored with minimal human intervention.
“Digitizing paper-based workflows saves time and money and reduces costs, and extracting data from physical records enables you to build valuable databases that are available for advanced analytics. Improved data management can make it possible to evaluate internal processes, better understand your customer base, generate key market research and begin new initiatives.”
It's clear that moving your business processes to a digital filing system can give you new advantages while providing a more thorough audit trail.
Go Paper Free and Become Environmentally Friendly
Mobile and digital forms can save companies a tremendous amount of money and can also help them operate more efficiently and find new revenue streams. You'll need the right mobile forms software builder to build forms for any mobile device and finally go paperless.
Alpha TransForm is ideal for the task because it offers the development speed of mobile forms products with the power of low-code development platforms. Users can be confident they're building enterprise apps that will never run out of power.
Alpha TransForm helps business users or developers craft online or offline mobile apps in minutes that utilize the latest mobile features (camera, GPS, etc.) for fast, accurate data capture (think inspection forms, patient intake forms, etc.). Alpha TransForm apps can be modified and updated in minutes, to quickly respond to business or field needs.
Learn more about Alpha TransForm and try it free with sample apps for 30 days.
Comment