Entrepreneurs & Business Data: How To Minimize Costs and Increase Profits

Knowing overhead costs may seem fundamental to conducting business. But it's often an obscure detail for business owners, particularly in a company's earliest stages.  One overhead cost that can be particularly elusive is the cost to a company for creating, storing and managing its documents manually. 

Electronic management of documents can prevent or greatly reduce many of those costs, thus providing a more efficient and substantially profitable business.

Let’s look at some of the facts:

1. Most people believe when they start a business that a 4 drawer file cabinet costs about $150.00 give or take! When actually – to prepare the cabinet for useful office filing – you must have the addition of the folders that hold the paper and the hangers that hold the folders – now you are much more likely to have a cabinet that costs you approximately - $700.00!
   
2. 70% of the cost of office documentation is directly attributed to the amount of time employees spend handling that documentation. Considering (one employee)  $15.00 per hour – 260 working days & 6 minutes per file – the average annual cost to handle / pull and return 10 documents per day could be $3900.00. Research within the industry has shown comparatively the cost of handling the paper files vs handling the electronic files is a minimum of 10:1 in favor of the electronic.
   
3. Disaster Recovery is becoming extremely more prevalent – the loss of documents due to fire, storms such as tornados or theft is undetermined at best, incalculable at its worst. Documents stored in an electronic format are easily backed up and stored offsite. Not true with paper based files – they are expensive to duplicate and extremely expensive to store.
   
4. 75% of all printed office documentation is printed for internal office usage multiple times per employee. Where the real costs come into play is when you begin to consider the copier cost plus the paper and toner costs associated with the number of prints that you may be printing. This number begins to grow astronomically in accordance with the success of the business and the number of employees. This cost is easily cut from the expense line on the profit and loss statement by the emailing and sharing of electronic documentation.

Note:  In today’s fast moving and forever changing world of mobile communications and broadband networking we must always be able to share and move the needed data quickly / securely and inexpensively in order to be competitive within our perspective market places.