We understand that for some businesses, storage of paper documents does not appear at first glance to be an added cost. We have a client who owns their building and the entire attic is available for document storage. In their case, they wouldn't save much money, if any, by eliminating that paper storage. Maybe they'd save on banker's boxes, but that's minor.
On the other hand, if anyone ever has to dig through those boxes looking for something, especially on a hot summer day when the attic is sweltering, it would be easier, certainly more pleasant, and less expensive if the documents were stored in a computer somewhere. But that's covered in the electronic document retrieval section.
Cost Savings, Time Savings
Another client of ours transitioned to electronic document storage and in just over a year converted an entire room from document storage to a quite nice private office.
And we know from personal experience that a rented storage unit is very difficult to get rid of once it is filled with banker's boxes full of paper files. We rented ours for more than 7 years!
In too many businesses, a regular task by office administration staff is filing the company's weekly paperwork into filing cabinets. The labor cost savings alone of this task would probably pay for a complete document management system.
Then once a year, an entire year's paperwork is removed from the office filing cabinets, boxed up and moved to longer-term storage, either in the office, in the attic, in a rented storage unit, in a warehouse across the street, or somewhere else. At the same time (hopefully), the oldest year's papers are laboriously removed from long-term storage and the commercial shredder is called to come get it. Does this process sound familiar?
That's a lot of work, and that's a lot of cost. Virtually all of it can be eliminated with electronic document storage.