Your Document Management Knowledge Center

It seems we are hearing more and more about “job creation” these days. But while the politicians continue to pontificate on the wisdom of enacting further corporate tax cuts to encourage job creation, it’s important to remember that there are other ways that you can control to find the capital necessary to increase your workforce and your bottom line. Many of these savings can be realized quickly by leveraging the benefits of on-demand document management and workflow software.

The True Cost of “Creating a Job”

Politicians, traders, economists, and various business leaders…are all debating on what it will take to chisel down unemployment and create more jobs. But with all this rhetoric, you may not know the actual cost of adding an employee to a company payroll.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the cost of adding a job breaks down as follows:

$40,630.20 (Base Wage; the average weekly earnings for a private sector worker according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics is $781.35 x 52 weeks)

+

$17,064.68 (Benefits and tax cost; the BLS says that for every $1 in wages, employer costs for taxes and benefits are $0.42)

= $57,967.88 (Total Annual Direct Costs to employers for the average worker)

Wow!  And that figure doesn’t even include the cost of rent, telephone/internet, computer, or training for the average worker. Experts say these other costs can add thousand of dollars more per year, depending on the specific industry and job requirements.

Now that we’ve established that it’s expensive to add a job, the question becomes how to find operational savings that can help fund new positions for growing companies. Part of the solution can be found in the effective daily use of cloud-based document management and workflow software.

Document Management Provides Immediate Savings to Help Fund Expansion Plans

One the major reasons on-line document management systems have become as prolific and popular as they have in recent years is because their return on investment is nearly always swift and sustainable. Document management can help even the smallest business improve its process management, increase workflow efficiencies, and reduce unnecessary cost and waste. 

How can document management save you money?

Time / Man Hour Savings

With cloud-based document management, all documents and files are received or captured, shared, stored, and retrieved instantly with just a few clicks. This nearly eliminates the manpower and time spent manually processing, filing, retrieving, and re-filing paper documents – which on average takes at least 4 minutes per file.

Have you ever sat in your office and watched the parade to the printer or copier? I have. In fact, I have been in new clients offices and watched their staff make so many trips to the file room, printer and copier that I wonder how they get any work done. They need people just to find, print and deliver the documents all day. The scary part is that they are so used to working like this they don’t see the costs of time associated with these activities.

Assume an employee files and/or retrieves 50 documents daily and then extrapolate that over the course of one year: The labor costs for filing alone totals almost $16,000 and occupies over 830 man hours to complete. 

Document Management Labor Savings Calculator

In contrast, with on-line document management, employees can find and process files in seconds without ever leaving their desk.

Physical Office Space Savings

The average 5-drawer file cabinet occupies 12 square feet of office space when you consider the room it takes to fully open a drawer.  When you multiply this out over 8 full cabinets, your documents take up almost 100 very expensive square feet of space.  At an average cost of $35/square foot annually, those file cabinets are literally costing your business $3,500 every year.  And, we haven’t even addressed offsite document storage and retrieval costs.

Document management also facilitates telecommuting with absolute affordability, security and ease, further decreasing the need to maintain costly office space.

Paper Savings

Working with electronic documents using software that indexes each page so that it can be quickly found – no matter who entered it - can eliminate the need for paper, which can be undeniably substantial.  At $.02 per sheet, multiplied by the average 10,000 sheets of paper handled by employees annually, paper can cost businesses $200 per employee annually. 

Miscellaneous Savings

With the right solution, businesses can effectively reduce the need for ink, toner, postage, courier expenses, costly copy/fax equipment maintenance, and off-site and on-site storage supplies and fees, resulting in additional and immediate savings. 

Business Process and Workflow Automation

Many web-based document management solutions provide a workflow module or offer it as an add-on option. Automated workflow software, especially those that have rules-based workflow helps eliminate repetitive manual tasks associated with routine business processes. 

Routing, reviewing and approving documents can be accomplished in a few seconds versus hours, days or weeks. This in turn, can mean revenue is created faster and frees up staff for higher value activities creating the capital needed to increase sales and marketing efforts for increased business development – which creates jobs!!!