Businesses tear through paper copy at an annual rate of 10,000 sheets per employee, reports Mashable. Even if the cost of buying paper is less for a business, the cost associated with its use is higher. The real cost includes handling invoice documents, storing records, mailing correspondence, maintaining receipts and manual reporting.
Aside from the higher costs, the increasing use of paper implies that companies have to deal with a lot of information that can easily get lost, stolen, or damaged. And it leads to a form of maintaining documents that moves too slowly for today’s business clock.
The good news is that there are tools that can automate and streamline businesses processes to reduce paper use that benefits your company’s bottom line as well as the environment. In many cases, it’s about making small investments into tools that can reduce paper costs as well as provide several other cost-saving benefits.
HelloSign – Electronic Signatures
HelloSign will eliminate inefficient paper trails from your office by letting you create, edit, sign and deliver documents digitally. Though e-signatures have been around for long, HelloSign offers an elegant, modern UI and an emphasis on task completion. The web-based tool lets you work with documents through a drag and drop function.
Users can create or upload a signature that can be used on any of the documents. Text-functions work seamlessly, and after a document is signed, you just need to enter an email address, add a custom email message if you desire, and press the Send button. Say goodbye to really complex signature flows with this tool.
ADP Procure-to-Pay – Electronic Payment & Invoicing
For businesses under pressure to make spending decisions and adapt to changing business environments, ADP.com says its Procure-to-Pay electronic invoicing and electronic payment solutions can assist in improving spend control and reducing cost invoicing. The company also realizes that outdated payment processes and paper-based invoicing can take you in the wrong direction.
By letting you better manage the entire payables process digitally with automated workflows that helps in reducing speed and hands-off processing time, the solutions eliminate paper waste. Additionally, they also integrate into your existing workflows and remove the need for manual keying of data. The intelligent document management is backed by a cloud-based solution.
Shoeboxed
This tool scans paper receipts to make your office clutter-free. The receipts can be scanned on the go on your PC as well as your smartphone with the Receipt and Mileage tracker app. The tool can also be used to create custom categories for the receipts, making it easy to compile reports during the tax season, without requiring paper piles of tax documents.
And for those who don’t have time for scanning, Shoeboxed takes care of the responsibility. You just need to dump the receipts other documents that need to be scanned in one of the Magic Envelops, and drop them in the mail. In a few days, everything gets scanned and is there in your Shoeboxed account.
Nitro
PDF editing is a menace for many businesses, requiring conversion, printing, uploading etc. and this results in the use of paper unnecessarily. Nitro makes sure the use of paper is kept to a minimum by converting files back and forth from PDFs into commonly used documents.
You are able to get the PDFs as Excel and Word documents, which prevents the need for multiple print outs and saves time in the process.
Featured image credit: Business Processes Automation/ShutterStock
