Stop wasting money on documents

Doing business has become more expensive in the past 18 months. We can directly attribute this to inflation, supply chain pressures and overall geopolitical unrest. With these real threats to profit margins, it is creating an environment where companies are trying to decrease costs rather than relying on increasing sales. We see clear evidence of this in the market through layoffs, reduction in technology sales and overall risk aversion from buyers and businesses.

 

Large and mid-sized organisations are now looking at how to cut costs without impacting operating cadence. One of the areas that often is overlooked is the cost of creating, managing and storing documents.

 

It sounds obvious, but every business needs documents, and every business is wasting a significant amount of money on their current document programs. And there are tangible areas where the cost of poor documentation can directly impact your P&L. 

 

Incorrect data or an incorrectly-formatted document can cost more than $100,000 per day.

 

Last year, Trans.info surveyed 162 logistics executives, and found that of the surveyed organisations, 57 per cent experienced shipping delays in the past year that were directly caused by documentation errors such as missing information, incorrect codes or manual errors.  If you combine this with the fact that a one-day delay of clearing goods at customs can cost up to $250,000 in additional logistics expenses per shipment, poorly formatted documents can cost your business millions of dollars per year.

 

Beyond physical shipping delays, with the rollout of e-invoicing in Europe, incorrectly formatted documents can cost your organisation as much as shipping delays. If you submit an incorrect invoice, you will need to pay per transaction processing fees, approximately $53.50 in internal correction costs, and you could face taxes or government-imposed fines for non-compliance. For an organisation that works internationally with customers and suppliers, these numbers can quickly compound as more countries require e-invoicing.

 

Your team wastes up to 50 per cent of their day working on or searching for documents.

 

Studies reveal that your most expensive employees, your knowledge workers, are spending up to 50 per cent of their day creating and preparing documents. Over 49 per cent of employees admit that they struggle finding documents, and the average worker spends more than 30 per cent of their day looking for information according to IDC.

 

While AI may help recover some of this lost productivity, a large share of manual work remains: invoices are still handled as structured documents that must be reviewed on‑screen; and in the US, checks continue to be paper‑based, requiring physical handling. If you compound this with the fact that manual data entry can cause up to 5 per cent of processing errors, you can do the math – your team is wasting expensive time on tasks that could be solved with a comprehensive document management solution.

 

Your company spends between 1-3 per cent of your total revenue on printing.

 

Yes. You read that correctly. Despite green initiatives, it is a known fact that businesses still print documents. And that managing, printing and sending those documents costs well over $10 per document. Georg Jensen, a Danish luxury goods manufacturer with over 150 million in annual sales, worked out that its printed documents cost over €500,000 per year. But by implementing a flexible document solution that can minimise your printing footprint, you could capture up to 80 per cent of that hard cost back. 

 

You don’t often think about the actual cost of documents because they are so ingrained in every aspect of your business. But, when reviewing how to save your organisation money without having to completely change your operating model, taking control of your document program may be an easy win with real, bottom-line savings.

 

If this sounds like something you’re interested in and you want to explore some quick wins you can put on the board this year, check out Lasernet. 

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by Lexi Rice, VP Marketing, Lasernet Group