The old fashioned notion that an office cluttered with paper is the sign of a productive, hard-working staff is long gone, but in many offices the paper is still there. Paper is the bane of office automation and productivity. Here are just a few examples of the problems with paper:
- Paper is expensive and a needless waste of natural resources.
- It is a slow, inefficient way to communicate and store information.
- Paper doesn’t save work. It creates more work.
- More paper means more file cabinets, less office space, filing and refiling.
- It is an office anchor. You can’t work remotely when your business runs on paper.
- Paper is hard to automate. Almost 40% of all invoices are still paper.
What Is Required to Get Rid of Paper?
Getting rid of paper means you need to establish email communication with your vendors and customers. This means of course that you need their email addresses. Seems simple, but that is where the rub is – 30-70% of customer and vendor email addresses are unknown. Many companies have done business for years with customers and vendors using paper for communication. Momentum keeps the manual processes going. The lack of email addresses is not recognized as an issue until the need for paperless communication and office automation becomes painfully obvious. Obtaining missing email addresses can be a challenge.
How Do You Get The Missing Email Addresses?
It takes time and effort to call for missing email addresses. Mailing letters requesting email addresses also takes time, effort, and the cost of processing and mailing. And, the number of responses may not justify the effort and cost. If you have hundreds or thousands of customers and vendors, contacting them manually may not be the right solution for you, especially if your accounting department is already overloaded by the pandemic.
If you want to go paperless and automate your business processes, you’ve got to find an automated way to collect missing email addresses. Some companies have used a free Google form to do that. They then imported the emails into their accounting system.
How Do You Go Digital?
Once the email addresses are in your system you can contact your customers and vendors to:
- Announce that you are going paperless (at least on your side)
- Introduce email delivery of statements, emails and remittances
- Announce a self-service portal for vendors and customers to self-manage their accounts
With automated credit and collection solutions you can get rid of paper and go digital to increase productivity and accelerate cash flow. Profile Management, Onboarding Sequences, Automated Customer Communications and a Self-Service Portal can make it easy for your team to optimize the benefits of office automation.
Lockstep Collect, a leader in cloud-based credit and collection platforms, can help you collect cash in 4 ways:
- Cloud-based solutions
- Automated customer communications
- Customer self-service
- Collections Activity Management
Lockstep Collect is an experienced software partner that can help you maximize your collections and cash flow in the new normal.
If you would like to learn more about how you can benefit from automated credit and collection solutions, please contact Lockstep Collect at www.lockstep.io.
