If you are still relying on paper transactions, then please stop right this minute. Have you seen what the pandemic did to the world in just 10 months? The pandemic has a solution—a vaccine and stricter laws on protecting endangered animals. Climate change, rising sea levels, deforestation, and global warming… we are long past the due date on stopping the impact of our actions. What we can only do now is to save as much of the remaining healthy environment as we can. It begins at home and in the office where we spend much of our time. It’s the little things that will eventually allow the environment to breathe once more.
Your business should be a prime mover of environmental protection. One of your corporate advocacies should be on protecting the environment at all costs, even it means higher expense for your business. You’re going to want to do this once you realize how real climate change is, and how it can impact all industries. One of the most important things you can do is to digitalize everything in your home and office. You can start with the massive pile of paper on your desk.
Documentation
Companies argue that they have to keep printed copies of their employees’ files, as well as the various contracts they enter in with their suppliers and clients. Do you think the digital world has no tool for this type of documentation? That’s why you should consider your archiving compliance need. It streamlines the process of archiving important documents you may not need now but may need in the future. Instead of filling up your file cabinets with documents, contracts, inventory sheets, and income statements, you can archive these in a safe digital location.
E-signatures
You do not have to sign office documents on paper. You can do it with e-signatures. Misconceptions about the e-signature should be put to rest. It’s actually safer than wet signatures. Paper documents are easy to tamper with. E-signatures are precise. Most of them also come with security features, which means that the signature is authenticated with bank credentials (in the case of checks), mobile ID, or other such devices. A trusted third party will create and secure your e-signature. You can use it on any type of document, regardless if it’s for a business contract or a bank check.
Note-taking
Why use pen and paper when writing down notes during a meeting? Isn’t that counterproductive? Handwritten notes are hard to read. They become useless when compared to other electronic notes. You can use tablets to write down notes during a meeting. This makes it easier to pass these notes to your employees, or even to review them later when you need to revisit some concepts and ideas discussed during the meeting. If your business has the budget for it, provide tablets to your employees, so they can use these for note-taking.
Paperless Billing
If you are still receiving paperless billing, ask your utility providers to send it to your email instead. Most of them will prefer sending digital copies of your bill anyway. Why would you still want to receive paper billing when you’ve been paying these bills electronically? It doesn’t make sense to keep documents of your paper bills when you can simply save PDF copies of these bills to your hard drive. The utility companies will send you digital receipts, too. When you trust the internet enough to send money online, you should trust it with paying your bills, too.
Cloud Storage
What is the cloud for if you’re not going to use it? The cloud allows you to access your digital files wherever in the world you may be. The best thing about it is that you do not need a laptop or desktop computer to do so. You can access your files through your smartphone. So, even if you’re in the Swiss Alps taking a break from work, you can still access corporate documents as long as you are in a trusted and secure network.
The digitalization of businesses is an important component of their success. Going paperless on every imaginable process in your business will save time, money, effort, and resources. Not to mention, it will help build a better world and a more protected environment, which benefits not only your business but your family as well. If you still don’t believe the world is interconnected and that one small action in a market in Wuhan can impact the world, revisit the past 10 months. That will tell you why your move to protect the environment is going to impact the generations to come.
