Tips for reducing paper work

Paper work in business is often synonymous with busy work. It is thought of as a waste of both time and material resources. Much of the paperwork associated with business is governmental paperwork and aa act recently passed to reduce the paperwork required for small businesses by the government. This act is called the Small Business Paperwork Relief Act (SBPRA) and you can read about it online at smallbusinessadvocate.com. Besides becoming politically active and trying to reduce paperwork on the governmental level, here are some tips to help you reduce paperwork in your business.

Evaluate all forms-the first step to reducing the amount of paperwork that you require is to go through all of your forms, and get rid of the ones that are redundant or that you don't need. If you have forms that are superfluous or outdated, get rid of one of them. If you have forms that can be combined with other forms, combine them. If you have forms that are required by policy but are not necessary to the job, get rid of them and remove reference to them from your policy and procedures manual. You might be able to reduce the amount of paperwork that you subject your employees to by half by just downsizing the number of forms that you have laying around.

Computerize-one of the greatest ways to reduce paperwork is to start using the computer more efficiently. For example, instead of sending tons of memos, you can implement a work-based email system where information is disseminated via the computer. This will save a lot of trees and it will make the workplace more efficient. Still, make sure that your memos are important. Sometimes when a work places switches to electronic memos, there is a tendency to over-memo. You want to only send out important memos and only send memos to the employees that the memos are intended for. If your employees get used to trash canning your memos because they lack content, the emailing will be less efficient than the paper memos.

Computerizing your workplace can reduce paperwork in other areas as well, in a well-designed network, group projects can be merged together onto a single spreadsheet. This is infinitely more efficient than everybody working on their own and then trying to put the pieces together at the end. Electronic signatures can be clicked on and filed, rather than having tons of files of signed reports. This will reduce paperwork and storage space. More than one person can also access files at a time and from any location, this reduces having to make duplication of most documents.

Smart-phones-communication technology has reached a point where you can do most of your "paperwork" over the phone. New phones allow the user to access the internet, send emails with attachments, and make conference calls from the field. The days of sending the data for a big report via federal express are over. Now, you can send the data, or the big report itself, to any place where your employee can get a cell phone signal.

Scanners-scanners are another piece of technology that will reduce the amount of time you spend on paperwork. Rather than making photocopies or carbon copies and then sending out copies of your forms, incident reports, proposals, or even photographs, you can now just run them through a scanner and make an electronic copy of the document or item. This invention can revolutionize your paperwork situation. For example, if you are trying to switch from a paper-based system to a computer-based system, you can scan in all of your paper records. Sure, this will take some time, but not nearly so much time as if you were trying to type in all of the information. If have not yet implemented computers into your workplace, use a scanner to help you do so.

Rating: 0/5 (0 votes cast)

---

Categories: Management Styles,

Help others find this article:
Socializer, Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, StumbleUpon

Favorites: Add to favorites
Tags: business_management management business paperwork forms paper_work computerize scanner