7 Apps Every Business Needs to Go Paperless

Growing businesses can create a competitive advantage by offering better customer experiences. Yet, many organizations rely on manual, paper-based processes that waste time and money, frustrating employees and customers. The average office worker uses over 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year while 45% of paper printed in offices ends up in the trash at the end of the day. Meanwhile, some legacy technologies and approaches are not well-suited for today’s evolving needs.

Fortunately, digital technologies can help businesses create better experiences for customers while creating new opportunities and efficiencies. Thanks to digital transformation initiatives, the paperless vision is becoming more of a reality for everyone.

Here are 7 apps that help your business on your paperless quest:

Box

Box is a convenient tool to help you store, manage, and share all your files. Whether it is a spreadsheet, presentation, document, audio file, or photo, Box provides a place for all your business content. In addition to storage, Box also offers content management, workflow and collaboration functionality.

Box can also integrate with your existing technology investments to connect your content across hundreds of other tools. As an example, through Docusign’s integration with Box, you can send your files for electronic signature directly from your Box account.

Evernote

The nature of how and where we work is changing and employees expect a more flexible work environment . Evernote makes it easy to take notes, make lists, photograph receipts, clip web pages, and save pictures to your account using your smartphone or tablet. Evernote augments collaboration and efficiencies by allowing you to sync and share your work with others as well as auto-syncing across all your devices.

Expensify 

As the name describes, this app helps remove paper from the expense report process. The paper-based approach required employees to suffer through attaching receipts, scanning them, making copies and often filing out a printed form. With the Expensify app, you scan receipts and easily add them to the expensive report. Changes and additions can be done quickly. This handy app also automatically detects details from your expense report such ass date, names, locations, and expense amounts.

 Scanable

Scanable, also from Evernote, enables users to scan important documents with your mobile device or tablet. Scan documents, expense receipts, or whiteboards images to quickly share or save for colleagues via email or text. Scanable has a helpful feature that automatically rotates, crops, and adjusts images so they are clear and easy to read.

Eventbrite

Eventbrite is a popular app that many people use to buy tickets and find events. But what if you’re the business looking to promoting an event? This app will help you make your ticketing paperless. With Eventbrite, you can plan the event, set up ticket sales, promote events and publish them across your social networks directly from the site's interface. On the payment side, the Eventbrite app features mobile payment options, electronic tickets, and completely digital attendee check-in lists. Recently, new features now allow you (as an event producer) to take digital payments at the event and then send attendees a digital receipt.

Square

Growing businesses who need a point-of-sale option may not want to invest in expensive bulky payment equipment. The Square for Retail app features payments, tipping, digital receipts, inventory, reports, and more. This app works in various forms: magstripe, contactless and chip, as well as terminals such as a point-of-sale tablet. The Square app also features multi-location inventory to track the cost of goods sold as well as an option to create customer profiles and view purchase history. Whether you’re selling in-store or online, Square allows helps businesses gain strategic insights on customers, vendors and inventory.

Docusign eSignature

From sales contracts and offer letters to account openings and invoices, agreements are everywhere. Manual paper-based agreement processes reduce employee productivity, delay business outcomes and create legal and compliance risks. Paper-based signature processes that involve printing, scanning, faxing and rekeying data can lead to $36 in additional costs per agreement. With Docusign eSignature, you have the ability to complete contracts, consents, and other agreements in minutes rather than days. Now eSignature is part of the Docusign Agreement Cloud, that includes more than a dozen applications covering the entire agreement process, from preparing to signing, acting on, and managing agreements. On both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, Docusign’s mobile app has by far the most reviews in the e-signature category, and an average of 4.9 out of 5 stars.

A paperless horizon for businesses

Just in the U.S. alone, 68 million trees a year are used to produce paper and paper products. Commercial deforestation accounts for 15 percent of global warming. One simple way we can all contribute to combating this problem and saving the forests is to reduce our paper usage. In addition to the environmental impact, consider the impact to your business if your paper-based records were lost due to a fire or flood? A paperless approach to your business can help you securely store, share and retrieve any important document while also helping to preserve the environment.