News : The Real cost of Paper

One of the major cost benefit justifications for investing in a document management systems is the amount of physical space used to store multiple cabinets or racks of information, but there are other aspects that are often overlooked and contribute to the real cost of paper

• Documents cannot be filed under more than one category, unless multiple copies are made this takes even more space
• Staff working from home or at other sites cannot gain access to specific documents unless someone faxes or emails a document to them
• Related documents and correspondence from letters, faxes and emails to presentations, technical diagrams, contracts and marketing material cannot easily be filed together, without more paper being printed and documents being photocopied,
• Locating documents is highly time-consuming and frustrating, if not impossible
• Employees waste a great deal of time re-creating or re-requesting documents that already exist.

The documents involved may be concentrated in one department, or exist in abundance across the organisation – from customer invoices, receipts or other accounts files to human resource information .i.e. Contracts, employee correspondence, bonus details holiday requests.  

10 years ago the International Records Management Council broke down the cost of managing paper as follows

Costs have increased since this research was done, IT market analyst IDC estimates that today US companies spend a staggering $25-35 billion a year filling, storing and retrieving incoming paper.