10 Power Stats Supporting Document Management

There is no question that businesses of all sizes are going digital, and this certainly does not stop with document management. Many workplaces now have a goal of going paperless with their document storage, which will provide an enormous amount of advantages such as easy access, cost savings, and added security.

Many SMB owners are not aware of the high costs associated with hard copy storage and the vulnerabilities that it presents. Here are 10 Power Stats that support the movement to electronic document management:

1. The majority of small businesses (75 percent) do not have a disaster recovery plan in place. This could mean a substantial loss of valuable information would occur in the event of a natural disaster or fire.
2. It’s been estimated that more than 70 percent of businesses would fail within a 3 week period in the event of a disaster because they do not have a recovery plan in place.
3. Reportedly, US companies spend more than $120 billion on an annual basis printing hard copy documents.
4. Shockingly, 80 percent of all information is still stored in a hard copy format even though a higher percentage of these documents are also available digitally. These duplicated efforts create a waste of storage space and heighten the risk of a breach in security.
5. Hard copy storage can be attributed to lower productivity as it has been reported that office workers spend 40 percent of their time searching for printed document information.
6. If you think that hard copy storage is more affordable, think again. It has been estimated that it costs $20 to file a hard copy document with all aspects of the filing process taken into consideration, such as the amount of time that it takes an employee to hunt down a misfiled document.
7. On an annual basis, approximately 3 percent of hard copy documents are misfiled and approximately 7.5 percent are lost completely.
8. If you think about all of the costs that go into manually processing a hard copy invoice, it can cost your organization $24 on average per invoice.
9. 10,000 pages are printed each year on average by one employee, and approximately 17 percent of these pages are never used.
10. The average document is copied 9 to 11 times, which contributes to waste, increased costs, and inefficiency.

Sources:  The Paper Project, American Micro, Tech Republic

We invite you to download our free whitepaper to find out more about the changing role of documents and how they will improve the way you work.