5 Ways Paperless Reporting Reduces Costs in the Protective Coatings Industry

For the Price of a Coffee and Cake Per Week, Can You Afford Not To?

Paperless reporting improves time management, helps you collaborate with colleagues and clients more effectively, and improves efficiency and security (among several reasons to go paperless).

In this article, we explore another of the benefits of paper reporting in the protective coatings industry – the money that you could save. We also show you how to calculate how much money you could be saving by using the paperless reporting capabilities of IRIS.

1. Save on stationery costs

How much does your stationery cost, and how much could paperless reporting save you? Of course, all operations are different, but according to Pitney Bowes, a small business of between one and four people spends around £870 on stationery each year. Larger businesses benefit from the advantages of scale, but still spend as much as £300 per employee.

How much does stationery cost you? Review your stationery spending on last year’s accounts, and divide the cost by the number of employees. For a more accurate answer, divide the total cost by the number of employees who use stationery.

Many companies that do this calculation are surprised by just how high their stationery costs per employee are. But the costs do not stop here.

2. Save on storage space

Your paper files must be kept safely, in filing cabinets. As your business grows, your need for filing space grows with it. You move from one to two to many filing cabinets. Let’s not concern ourselves with the cost to purchase filing cabinets, but examine the cost of keeping them in your office:

  • First, measure the floor area on which a cabinet in your office stands
  • Now, ask a member of staff to open a drawer and access a file
  • Note the space they use as they stand and move to find the file
  • Now add this floor area to the floor area of the cabinet itself
  • Finally, multiply this by the number of cabinets in your office

This gives you the total floor area that your cabinets are ‘using’.

The final calculation is to multiply the floor space by your office rental costs (per square foot).

How does this measure up?

According to Digiscribe, the average four-drawer filing cabinet requires 17 square feet of space. Let’s say that your office rental costs are £25 per square foot. Each cabinet is costing you £425 per year – just to store files. Four filing cabinets at this rate will cost you £1,700 per year.

3. Save on postage

If you are still sending your paint inspection reports by snail mail, this is another cost that you could avoid. The actual cost will depend upon the size of your reports, of course. But let’s consider a company that sends three reports each week, with each report costing £3.00 to send. That’s a total of £468 per year.

With IRIS technology, there is no need to send paper reports. Your reports can be digitally signed off from the app.

4. Save on printer ink and maintenance

If you are printing off reams of paper to send to clients or file in your expensive filing cabinets, you’re also using printer ink. How much you use depends upon your printer, its age and efficiency, and whether you are printing in colour.

Printer ink is not reducing in price. If your printer breaks down, there will be maintenance costs. When was the last time you considered just how much your printer and the ink you feed it is costing you?

5. Save on file retrieval time

Even with the best filing system in the world, files get mislaid and lost. Research from the Office of National Statistics shows that each employee spends two whole days each year looking for paperwork. Let’s say that you are paying your office employee £15 per hour. That’s around £240 per employee every year, that you are spending for files to be located.

How much could paperless reporting save you each year?

The numbers we’ve shown above are, of course, only for illustration. Your actual costs are unique to you. By calculating them, you will learn just how much your current paper-based reporting is costing you.

How much is it? £1,000 per year per employee? £2,000? More?

For the price of a coffee and cake each week, you could eliminate most of these costs and deliver professional paperless reporting internally and externally that saves time and money, and ensures compliance.

For a no-obligation demonstration of the paperless reporting capability of IRIS, contact us today.