The Cost of Paper Documents in Any Organisations

The cost of archiving can easily be overlooked in most organisations. However with the recent downturn in Nigeria, other African and oil producing Nations, the recurrent expenditure can be channeled to other significant business needs.

There is no gain saying that organisations cannot survive without keeping history of back office operations in document archives, but these costs can be a daunting responsibility where organisations are attaining more edge with slimmer budgets.

Consider the following tangible and intangible re-occurring budget cost in handling your paper document archive:

• Cost of rent of space
• Cost of file racks and/or cabinets
• Cost of missing document
• Cost of misfiled documents
• Cost of flood and/or disaster
• Cost of printing
• Cost of duplication
• Cost of access
• Cost of retrieval
• Cost of wear and tear
• Cost of handling
• Etcetera.

Also consider the cost of digitisation, which is the cost of buying high-end fast document scanners, cost of buying computers, cost of buying electronic and/or cloud storage device and cost of technical know-how in converting paper archive to digital format.

To some, the cost of the latter may be huge compared to the cost of the former as a result of the number of years in business and the volume of document in archive. But, the fact remains that those seemingly intangible cost of paper archive builds over time while the cost of digitisation drastically reduces over time. The benefits of going digital far outweighs its cost.

Julius Macaulay is a seasoned Enterprise Content Management consultant with over 12 years of providing #ECM #EDMS #BPM solutions and services to diverse business sector.