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The paperless office has been “just around the corner” since The Office of the Future, published in Business Week on June 30, 1975, predicted that computers would soon eliminate paper from the workplace entirely. More than fifty years later, most offices are still printing, filing, and hunting for misplaced documents. That’s not necessarily a failure of technology. Rather, it’s a more honest picture of how businesses actually work, and it points to what going paperless really means in practice.
The goal for most organizations isn’t zero paper. It’s digital-first workflows that reduce cost, improve access, and protect information. Paper-based workflows are reserved for the situations where they genuinely make sense. This guide covers why the transition matters, what tends to get in the way, and how to approach it practically.
Why Going Paperless Is Worth the Effort
The case for reducing paper in your office is more than just environmental. In fact, the most meaningful benefits are operational.
Cost savings across the full document lifecycle. Paper costs extend well beyond the price of the paper itself. There’s printing, toner, hardware maintenance, filing cabinets, and the physical space those cabinets occupy. And that’s before accounting for the labor hours spent filing, retrieving, and re-filing documents. According to the Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance, the average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper every year. A PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that businesses spend an average of $20 in labor to file each document, $120 to search for each misfiled document, and $250 to search for a lost one. These costs can quickly add up at any scale.
Faster document processing. According to a Statista survey, faster document processing is cited as the top benefit of going paperless by 55% of companies — ranking above cost reduction, improved collaboration, and every other advantage measured.
Better security and access control. Paper is surprisingly difficult to secure. Anyone with physical access to a filing cabinet can read its contents, and there’s no audit trail for who looked at what. A document management system allows access to be managed by user roles and permissions — some employees can view a document but not edit it, others can do both, and sensitive files can be restricted entirely. In the event of a fire, flood, or break-in, digitized documents backed up to the cloud survive intact. Paper records do not.
Support for remote and hybrid work. The shift to hybrid work has made digital document access a practical necessity rather than a nice-to-have. Employees working from home need to retrieve, review, and sign documents just as they would in the office. A paper-based system simply cannot support that. Organizations that had already digitized their records were significantly better positioned when remote work became the norm.
A cleaner, more efficient workspace. Less paper means less physical storage, which often translates directly to reduced real estate costs — or simply a more functional office. One family practice in Alberta converted 100,000 paper patient records to an electronic medical record system. The result: the clinic moved to a smaller office, redirected administrative staff to patient-facing roles, and grew patient volume from 5,800 to 7,000 per year with annual revenue increasing by 28%.
What’s Still Keeping Businesses from Going Fully Paperless
Despite all of this, the fully paperless office remains rare. A 2024 study by Quocirca found that only 11% of organizations describe themselves as truly paperless, while more than 70% say printing remains important to their business processes.
Understanding why helps set realistic expectations for your own transition.
Customers and partners still send paper. The single most common reason businesses continue handling paper is that the people they work with send it. According to the Quocirca study, 36% of organizations cite this as their top barrier. Even if your internal processes are entirely digital, incoming paper documents — contracts, invoices, applications, correspondence — need to be handled somehow. The answer isn’t to refuse paper; it’s to have a fast, reliable process for converting incoming documents to digital as soon as they arrive. A digital mailroom service can handle this automatically, receiving, scanning, and routing physical mail the same day it arrives.
Legal requirements and compliance. Quocirca found that 30% of organizations still rely on paper due to legal requirements in their industry or jurisdiction. Financial services, healthcare, and legal sectors face the most constraints here. That said, e-signature legislation has expanded substantially over the past two decades, and many situations that once required a wet signature can now be handled electronically. For guidance on what’s legally required in your industry, see our overview of whether scanned document copies satisfy legal requirements.
The need for physical signatures. Even outside strict legal requirements, 29% of organizations cite physical signatures as a reason they remain paper-dependent (Quocirca). Many people prefer to sign important documents on paper, and that preference doesn’t have to be an obstacle — e-signature tools offer legally valid alternatives that work for most document types.
Cultural habits and workflow inertia. Printing is convenient. Many professionals find it easier to review a long document, mark it up, or refer to it in a meeting when it’s on paper. These habits aren’t obstacles to be eliminated; they’re signals about where digital tools still have room to improve. The practical response is to digitize the workflows where the benefits are clearest and largest, rather than forcing a wholesale change everywhere at once.
How to Go Paperless: A Practical Roadmap
The businesses that successfully reduce their paper dependence tend to follow a similar sequence. They don’t try to change everything at once. They start with their biggest paper bottlenecks, get those working well, and expand from there.
Step 1: Audit Your Paper Workflows
Before buying software or renting a scanner, spend time mapping where paper actually moves through your business. Which departments generate the most paper? Where do documents get lost or delayed? What processes require printing something that could stay digital?
Common bottlenecks include: incoming invoices and bills, client contracts and agreements, HR forms and onboarding documents, expense reports, and permit or compliance paperwork. Write down who touches each document type, how long processing takes, and what breaks when something gets lost. Most businesses are surprised by what they find.
Step 2: Stop New Paper at the Source
The easiest paper to eliminate is the paper that never has to exist in the first place. Before you can tackle the backlog of existing files, it’s worth reducing the volume of new paper coming in.
Practical steps here include: switching to electronic invoicing and billing, asking vendors to send documents digitally, setting up online payment options for customers, replacing paper forms with digital equivalents, and using e-signatures for routine contracts and agreements.
Electronic statements and invoices not only reduce paper — they also speed up payment cycles. Customers who receive email reminders about their bills are more likely to pay promptly than those waiting for paper statements to arrive by mail.
Step 3: Convert Your Existing Paper Records
This is often the step that feels most daunting, and it’s where many businesses stall. Decades of paper files don’t disappear by switching to a new software platform. They have to be digitized.
For businesses with large volumes of legacy documents, partnering with a professional document scanning service is typically faster, more cost-effective, and higher quality than attempting to do it in-house. Professional scanning services have equipment that handles high volumes efficiently — processing hundreds of pages per minute compared to the 20–40 pages per minute of a typical office scanner. They can also clean up document quality during scanning, removing staples, adjusting orientation, and improving legibility, and can index documents so they’re searchable once digitized rather than just a pile of image files.
This process is often called a backfile conversion, and it’s a one-time project rather than an ongoing expense. Once your historical records are digitized and properly indexed, you can maintain a digital-first workflow going forward. It also pays to prepare your documents before the project begins — purging records that don’t need to be scanned saves time and cost.
For typed and printed documents, optical character recognition (OCR) software — typically included in professional scanning services — reads the text and makes it searchable. This is especially valuable for industries like insurance, where policy and claims files can run hundreds of pages, and legal, where finding specific information quickly across large case files is essential. Documents with significant handwritten content may require a manual data entry service for accurate extraction.
If your records include sensitive information — patient files, personnel records, financial documents, privileged legal communications — make sure your scanning vendor meets the appropriate security standards. Look for SOC 2 Type II certification and HIPAA compliance as baseline requirements.
Step 4: Choose a Document Management System
A document management system (DMS) is where your digitized files will live and how your team will access them. The right system depends on your industry, size, and compliance requirements, but the core functions are the same: secure storage, search, access control, and integration with the other tools your team uses. For a clear breakdown of how scanning and document management work together, see our guide to document scanning vs. document management.
Cloud-based systems have become the default for most businesses because they provide access from anywhere, scale easily, and eliminate the cost of maintaining on-site servers. When evaluating options, focus on how easily documents can be retrieved, how access permissions are managed, and whether the system integrates with your existing workflows.
Step 5: Add E-Signature Capabilities
For any business that regularly handles contracts, agreements, approvals, or client sign-offs, e-signature software is one of the highest-impact tools available. It eliminates the need to print, sign, scan, and email documents — a process that often takes days and requires everyone involved to have access to a printer.
E-signatures are legally valid for most document types in the United States under the ESIGN Act and UETA, and internationally under equivalent legislation in most jurisdictions. They’re also more secure than handwritten signatures, since they include an audit trail showing who signed, when, and from where.
Step 6: Build Habits That Keep Paper Out
The final step — and the one that determines whether the transition sticks — is establishing workflows that prevent paper from accumulating again. A few practices that help:
Set up a digital process for incoming faxes (fax-to-email services convert incoming faxes automatically). Use mobile scanning apps so that paper that does arrive can be digitized immediately. Create a clear folder structure in your document management system so that digital files have a logical home. And train your team not just on the tools, but on the reasons behind the change — people follow processes they understand.
Tools That Support a Paperless Office
The specific tools your business needs will depend on your size and industry, but most paperless workflows rely on some combination of the following:
Document management systems handle storage, search, and access control for digital files. Cloud-based options from major providers integrate with email, calendar, and productivity tools most teams already use.
E-signature platforms allow documents to be signed electronically with legal validity. They’re available at a range of price points, including options suitable for small businesses with low signing volume.
Cloud storage and file sharing allows teams to collaborate on documents without emailing attachments back and forth. Files stay in one place, version history is preserved, and access can be controlled.
OCR and data capture software converts scanned documents into searchable, editable text. This is especially important for businesses converting large volumes of historical paper records. For complex documents where automated capture isn’t sufficient, outsourced data entry and capture services can extract and structure the information with human verification.
Mobile scanning apps turn a smartphone into a scanner, making it easy to digitize documents that arrive in paper form without waiting for a trip to the office scanner. For higher volumes, a centralized scanning approach through a professional vendor produces better image quality and more consistent indexing.
Electronic invoicing and billing platforms eliminate paper statements from the billing process, speed up payment cycles, and reduce the administrative overhead of managing paper invoices.
The Realistic Expectation: Hybrid Is the Norm
A recent Vasion study found that 41% of workers rely on a hybrid mix of print and digital documents, while only 10% work fully digitally. Print hasn’t disappeared, and for most businesses, it won’t entirely.
The businesses that benefit most from the transition are the ones that identify where paper is creating friction, costing money, or creating risk, and address those specific areas first. A healthcare practice that digitizes patient records and billing while keeping a paper sign-in sheet at the front desk has made a meaningful improvement. A law firm that adopts e-signatures for routine agreements while maintaining paper originals for executed contracts has reduced cost and delay without compromising client trust.
The modern office is one that uses paper deliberately rather than by default. Every document that doesn’t need to be printed, filed, and retrieved in paper form is an opportunity to save time, reduce cost, and keep information more secure.
How Tab Service Company Can Help
Tab Service Company has been helping Chicago-area businesses and organizations across the country manage the transition to digital document workflows for over 65 years. Our back-office outsourcing services include:
- Document scanning and backfile conversion — high-volume scanning of existing paper records, including indexing and OCR so documents are searchable from day one
- Data capture and forms processing — extracting and organizing information from paper or electronic forms into usable, structured data
- Data entry services — manual processing with dual-verification for documents where automated capture isn’t sufficient
- Digital mailroom services — receiving, scanning, and digitally routing incoming physical mail so your team can access it from anywhere
As a SOC 2 Type II-certified organization, we apply rigorous security standards to every client engagement — with annual audits, documented chain of custody, and certified document destruction.
If you’re ready to start reducing your reliance on paper — whether you have a filing room full of records to digitize or just want to build a more efficient workflow going forward — contact us to talk through where to start.
Tab Service Company is a Chicago-based document management and data processing firm. For more information about our services, visit tabservice.com.
