Are your schools drowning in paper?
It’s a costly resource when budgets are already tight. Even with growing technology-driven processes, a typical school can still go through more than 320,000 sheets of paper each year. That takes about $16,000 a year from the school budget.
Most school districts have set a goal of reducing paper usage. Oftentimes this is to improve efficiency and interoffice communication. Many districts also have a “green initiative” that seeks to decrease its carbon footprint and help the environment, which includes reducing a reliance on paper for class handouts, school forms, HR records, transcripts, registrations, schedules, and more.
How can you tell if paper has become a drain on your school budget?
Here, we’ve put together a list of the signs that indicate your district could be saving considerable costs on paperwork.
1) You’re Recycling Lots of Paper
An easy indicator is a look in your recycle bins. Are they overflowing? If so, you may be wasting lots of paper and can implement changes in procedures that can help shrink your mountain of a recycle bin.
2) Employees are Making Lots of Copies
Looking around the office, how often is someone making copies? In many districts, the hindrance to going paperless may be staff’s existing processes. If manual, paper-based processes are typical of administrative workflow, it’s an opportunity to get everyone on board to redefine those processes.
3) You Still Have Stacks of Mail to Sort Through Daily
Stacks of mail filled with paperwork can have your office drowning in paper. From junk mail to bills, you can greatly minimize the paper in your office by enrolling in paperless billing or requesting to be removed from lists for direct mail and other types of solicitation.
4) Spending Lots of Time Searching Through File Cabinets
If you’re making great strides to become paperless (or close to it), you should be able to downsize your file room. Therefore, if your employees are always having to run to the storage room for files, you just have too much paper. In lieu of keeping papers around in file cabinets, consider moving to an e-file system. This will make it easier to find and even share files within the district.
5) Paper Supply Is Eating Up Your Budget
You might have been working on a plan to cut back on paper usage, but the truth is in the amount of paper your office is actually purchasing. If you’re re-ordering the same paper supply volume or more than you did in the past, it’s a red flag that a more aggressive paper-cutting strategy is needed.
How much could you be saving digitizing your processes with LINQ?
With LINQ Forms and Workflows, you could be immediately cutting back on paper costs. To find out how much you could be saving every year, we’re ready with a quick ROI Calculator to give you an estimate of your cost (and time) savings that could be going straight to your bottom line.