The Less Paper Office – Save Some Green While Going Green

Consumables such as paper, ink and toner are damn expensive. By simply reducing the amount of paper used, a business can reduce the costs of all three, all the while helping the environment.

While paper is a renewable resource, trees are being consumed at a non-sustainable rate. The manufacture of ink and toner is a particularly nasty business for the planet’s health, too. Most small businesses use far too much paper. According to reduce.org, the average office worker uses a shocking 10,000 pages per year. Averaged out over 200 work days, that’s 50 sheets of paper every single day! Save some green and use less paper, today – it just makes cents.

Here at Progressive, we have found that, in addition to saving money and reducing our environmental footprint, focusing on reducing our paper use has reduced office clutter and as a result, our company has become more efficient. I’d like to share a few things we have changed in our own practices over the last year or two that have made an impact.

We utilize digital storage and shared intranet workspaces, instead of ciruculating multiple copies of paper documents internally.

We now think before we ink, we screen preview our documents and we print to PDF’s. A better alternative to printing is that we utilize the capabilities of our Small Business Server and services such as SharePoint, Exchange and Microsoft Office.

Microsoft InfoPath and Adobe Acrobat are used in place of paper forms. Using our service management software, staff members seldom need paper output.

We have consolidated printing and scanning output from multiple wasteful devices to newer, efficient, more cost effective models. This saves on electricity and consumables.

We exchange information with our major vendors, such as Dell, Ingram Micro, Tech Data and others using EDI and paperless transactions.

We have written an average of less than 3 paper checks a month over the last 12 months by switching to Internet based payment methods.

Our banking transactions with Bank of America, Citibank, and American Express are virtually paperless, soon to be even higher, with new remote deposit and check scanning solutions.

By installing an additional license of our accounting software and tasking an office staff member with shipping/receiving, we have eliminated the paper purchase order altogether.

We have killed off the fax……Well almost! Unfortunately, this archaic technology is still in use by some. Using Microsoft SBS Server and it’s built in fax services, we send and receive paperless faxes in our office to eliminate the paper fax altogether.

We know there is a lot more to be done to become truly paperless. It’s not realistic to become a totally paperless office overnight, but it is super easy to attain a 50% or more reduction within a short period. Give some of these examples a try; search the web for other ideas. There’s a real good chance that you’ll save some money and reduce your environmental footprint at the same time.

I’m proud of our start and the gains we have seen from doing these simple things. Send me an e-mail with your thoughts or if you would like to chat further about our efforts.

Please help us with our next item. We are looking to reduce mailing consumables and postage costs and their effect on the environment. Sign up below to switch from mailed paper copy to e-mailed delivery of your invoices and statements.

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