How many folders of filed paperwork do you have in the office or in storage? If the answer is lots, technology has enabled us to eliminate that from our business, and go entirely paperless.
Paperwork is the burden of most businesses, and the thorn in the side of any admin team member, electrician, and even owner if you do it yourself. Well, it doesn’t have to be.
We’re going to look at a bunch of the common types of paperwork a business has, and how to eliminate them.
1) Invoices
This one is relatively easy to eliminate these days. Step one is to switch to a cloud based accounting software that stores all your records online – Xero is our pick for this one. It sounds painful, but you can transition from whatever you currently use to Xero pretty quickly and seamlessly, they even help you with the process. Once you’ve done that, you can eliminate having to store invoices. Your records will be stored online to be accessed by you anytime, anywhere. You don’t even need to print and post an invoice for your customer; it has an easy email feature.
2) Credit Card receipts
Related to invoices, is taking payments and having paper receipts from the credit card machine. Well there’s a better way! Use an online merchant system, such as CommBank’s Bpoint. It won’t print receipts anymore, instead it will email a copy straight to your customer, and store your copy online for later retrieval if needed.
3) Bank Statements
If you use Xero as per point 1, you can opt out of receiving paper statements in the mail. You’ll get live electronic statements go straight into Xero each day meaning you can keep on top of reconciliations and do away with paper.
4) Job Sheets
Job sheets are necessary to facilitate jobs to be actioned on time and correctly. Fortunately, they don’t need to be on paper anymore. There are various software types that handle this electronically and online. ServiceM8 and simPRO seem to be the most popular and offer the best job management solutions. All your records are kept online and are easily searchable.
5) OH&S Forms and other Internal Paperwork
There are a few platforms to handle this. GoogleDrive, iCloud Drive and Dropbox are the best. These let you save paperwork online (in the cloud) available to be accessed by anyone, anytime, anywhere. So rather than having paperwork in your sparky’s van, to be filled out, and returned to the office – now they can just fill out forms right away, and save them for your records, and email to a customer when needed.
At Mobile Test ‘n’ Cal, we have undertaken all of these steps, and more, to be almost totally paperless today. Even our reports and certificates are all managed online, and we only print copies for customers when it’s requested. Otherwise, we just store them online for our records, and email to our customers.
Paper is a burden on space, time, and the environment. Get rid of all of it today, and you’ll be much better off!
