As an office manager, it is your responsibility to order supplies while keeping the business’s bottom line intact. One expense you may have noticed increasing yearly and eating into your company’s profit margins is paper. You may think that it is impossible to get out of using paper, but not only is it possible, it is cost effective. No longer will you be a slave to the always rising costs of paper, you’ll be able to move forward and find yourself a new way to lower your overhead.
How Much Paper Do Offices Use
The first step to realizing that you have a paper problem is first to understand what your possible paper usage is for your office. If you are like most American businesses, you may use over a million pounds of paper each year. This depends entirely on how many employees your company has in its employ. The average American uses at least 748 pounds of paper each year. Multiply this by the number of workers you have and you can see how quickly this figure adds up. In fact, the average attorney will use over 1 ton of paper each year.
How Much Money Are You Wasting on Paper
So now that we’ve seen the problem of our collective paper usage, we need to discuss just how much money we are throwing away each year by not switching to paper alternatives. According to the 2003 ALL Associates white paper each business on the Fortune 1000 is spending at least $7,500 on paper per employee. No matter the size of your business, nearly $8000 per employee can be the difference between profit and loss.
As a business, you want to be profitable, and the best way to do that is to ensure that your company finds a way to cut the cost of their paper consumption. This is because not only are you spending the $7,500 on paper, but you are also spending money on wasted space to store the paper. You also end up spending money on things like toner and ink, postage, recycling, and more.
What Can You Do
One thing that you can do to minimize your costs is to go digital. Going digital will help you reduce the costs of storing paper. Not only will you free up space in your office to hire new workers but you can effectively lessen the amount of paper that you are storing. Storing just 70 filing cabinets full of paper can cost a business up to $22,000 while a 1TB hard drive might cost $55, and that will hold well over 700 filing cabinets full of data. There are many options out there for cutting your paper costs. One possible option is to make use of paperless software. There are many paperless software options out there including Filecenter, provided by Lucion Technologies. Of course, you will want to find the best option for your business, so we encourage you to look around for the best paperless option!
About the author:
The writer of this article, Lautaro Martinez, is an avid tech blogger who focuses on business technologies and the ways these technologies can help businesses to prosper. If you wish to learn more about Lautaro you can visit on Google+.