16 May Paper Paradox Explained

The paper paradox is a scenario where paper documents are becoming digital to increase accuracy and efficiency and reduce workload, but in contradiction, if not done with the proper tools it may cause more trouble for businesses.

In other words, the paper paradox implies that a company should go paperless according to the modern trend of digitisation, but at the same time, it should be careful not to come across more problems to deal with.

Why Is Digitisation A Necessity? 

Paper documents have lots of limitations other than the fact that they take a lot of space in an office and once the volume grows bigger, it’s hard to handle. Paper documents cannot be accessed from any other places than their actual physical location. Furthermore, they cannot be integrated with automated analytics, and more people are needed to analyse them and submit reports. Hence, it leads to lower productivity, and it is not close to being efficient due to human errors in analysis.

Therefore, digitisation of paper documents is the only way out and a lot of companies have already adopted the practice, and they are in the process of transformation. It makes the perfect combination of technology and people. It leads to a faster response like sharing, less burden of manual work in analysing them and can be accessed from any place due to cloud technology.

How To Solve Problems Associated With Going Paperless?

But there are a lot of problems that a company can face while going for paperless work. Transforming the texts on a document into digital via document capture software may not be 100% accurate, and hence, if it is a bill or receipt, there could be miscalculations. Therefore, after using optical character recognition software for document capturing, verification by a person has to may be required.

There are also security concerns of file hacking, files crashing and software breakdown. In such cases, operations can halt completely. If the segregation of files and documents are not done clearly from the beginning, everything may become a mess. Therefore, the step of capturing is very important as there could be various possibilities after scanning and capturing a document. Outputs should be saved in different formats like PDF, Doc, JPG for future usage.

Digitisation of paper documents also increases the expenditure of a company as it has to spend money to buy scanning machines, software for document management, add-on security tools, storage space, extra prices for advanced features. Therefore, when choosing document capture providers it is critical to make sure that prices are affordable, and no extra hardware is required.

How To Deal With Paper Paradox?

To tame the problem of paper paradox, there has to be a clear work process to convert physical files to digital ones. The document capture software has to be advanced so that maximum work is done automatically as per settings. It should capture a document, transform it accurately into digital format and files. Then it should classify them into preset categories according to settings and let someone search them effortlessly and manage them. It should also enable the admin to take bulk action. The paper paradox can be solved depending on the efficiency of the document capture software used and proper settings.

Further information about the paper paradox can be found at the Association for Information and Image Management’s publication here.

Start your company’s paperless journey today with CaptureFast’s cloud and mobile-based document capture solution. Find out more here.