When it comes to business expenditures, there are always ways that a company can save money. But it may surprise you that a key feature of saving money with expenditures may lie in an often used material that has key implications for the environment as well.

It has been estimated that each individual office worker in the United States uses about 10,000 sheets of paper each year. That paper is often used for memos, hand outs for presentations, and general documentation, as is the case with financials.

According to the Paperless Project coalition, 85% of business documents are still in paper form, which wastes a lot of paper each day. Consider: Printer and copier costs are typically the third largest office expense behind rent and payroll. And an average employee’s printing expenses can cost companies between $600 and $1,300 each year.

With all that expense–and there is more, considering that an average of four weeks is lost each year waiting on misfiled, mislabeled, and untracked documents–more companies are considering switching to an online way of storing and filing documents. This has foreseeable benefits for companies who fall prey to the paper conundrum each year.

Storing and filing documents online saves companies money and time each year. Consider the amount of paper filed by the four largest departments: accounts payable, accounts receivable, contracts management, and human resources. With these four departments alone storing their documents online, thousands of dollars in productivity can be saved.

Print management is the technical term used to describe the practice of storing and filing documents. Online print management refers to the use of a third party to store documents and issue them a file name so that they are easy to decipher and retrieve when the time comes.

Document management companies pride themselves on providing software that enable a company’s employees to have access to the files they need without the waste and inefficiency of paper copies. This eliminates the need for a constant stream of wasteful paper and the filing cabinets that store so many records that can be password protected if need be on document management systems.

Electronic document management through managed print services companies also provides ways for the online storage of documents to be organized, meaning departments can be kept separate in terms of who can access them.

The thing to remember about print management is that the bottom line contains money and time, while also impact the overflow of materials into the environment. The proliferation of paper has been amazing in terms of communication but landfills and other sites are overflowing with avoidable waste, especially with the rise of electronic digital storage.

For some final statistics regarding paper waste and the importance of switching over to digital storage, consider this:

• According to StopWaste.org, 17% of everything printed is considered waste.
• According to the Gartner Group, 15% of all paper documents are misplaced and 7.5% are lost completely.