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Small And Medium Businesses Spend Around 3 Months A Year Looking For Documents

11/01/2010

By Lea Pachta

With small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) across the country struggling to stay competitive, strategic investment in back office systems can make a big difference to the bottom line, freeing up resources to focus on business development.

Document management platforms may not be the first place companies look when trying to streamline operations, but research carried out by YouGov has shown that SMEs in the UK waste an estimated £42 million each day locating paper documents.

"We are increasingly seeing clients turning to document management as they look for efficiency savings," said Colin Gallick, CEO of Invu, which specialises in document management solutions for SMEs. "The key is identifying a platform that is easy to use, so employees adjust quickly, and that integrates with existing systems, since most SMEs can't afford to do a complete IT overhaul."

- SMEs spend approx. 3 months a year looking for documents
- 87% of respondents spend up to 2 hours every day looking for documents (on average, one hour of a person's time is worth £86.61 so that's £173.22 per person per day wasted across the UK!)
- 93% of people surveyed think they waste time looking for documents every day
- On average 46.93% of documents handled by SMEs are still paper based which is incredibly dangerous should there be a fire or flood

A quarter of all respondents couldn't say their company is compliant with the data protection act with less than 50% unaware that the DPA requires companies to reveal personal data held about an individual in any filing system within 40 days. With online data storage, vital business information is backed up, can't be damaged and is accessible at the touch of a finger.

So not only is it vital to a business to ensure compliance it can also streamline your business processes, drastically cut operational costs and give you lots of extra office space!

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