How GoFormz Affects Your Business’s Bottom Line

Make the smart investment to switch to digital forms

Whether you need digital sign in sheets for your healthcare clinic or permitting forms for your construction teams, forms are a big part of day-to-day business. If you haven’t thought about the different ways that switching to a digital forms solution can help your team, then you should at least be thinking about how much money it can save your business. Let’s take an in-depth look at how GoFormz can help save your business money.

Printing and Paper Costs

The number one savings you’ll see when you switch from paper forms to GoFormz is saving on paper, ink, or other printing costs. It may not seem like much as you continue to buy individual packs of paper or cartridges, but when was the last time you calculated your annual printing costs? If you’re like 90% of business owners, it’s possible you don’t even track these costs. Important things to keep in mind for these total costs are not just the printers, scanners, and copiers, but also the multiple types of paper, the ink or toner, and the repair and maintenance costs. 

So what else could you possibly be paying for? The 20-25% of all wasted printed documents, according to a PwC case study, the cost of time to find any misplaced or misfiled documents, and your own internal help desk time to support any printing malfunctions. As much as 15% of your help desk and IT support time (in other words, 15% of their combined salaries) is spent troubleshooting printing errors. All in all? IDC has found that printing and document management costs can eat up an average of 5% to 15% of the annual revenue of your business. Depending on your industry, it can range from $725 per employee to $1200 per employee each year.

Stay Ahead of the Competition

As a business owner or manager, you’ve likely been told that staying up on the latest technology trends is important, but have you considered why? Aside from keeping your business practices secure through encryption, you make your business scalable and less resource-dependent. This means you can avoid rising costs and inflation for certain business expenses. In the first half of 2022, paper prices have already increased 14%, and as the world continues to face growing inflation costs, many ink producers are adding price hikes of their own. By switching to GoFormz, your competitors may remain dependent on these rising costs, but your team can continue running smoothly without affecting your profit margins. 

Real Estate and Business Space

If you have paper documents, you’re going to need to store them somewhere. Depending on the document and your industry, you could be on the hook for maintaining these records for years, if not decades. Whether you’re investing in top-of-the-line filing cabinets, or whatever bankers’ boxes you can find, they’re going to have to live somewhere. Anyone looking at buying a home or renting office space right now can tell you just how expensive real estate markets are, so how much of your office space are you dedicating to file storage?

With the average monthly cost of rental office space currently running $35 per square foot, and a single average filing cabinet taking up three square feet, you’re already paying $105 per month. Multiply that by your number of filing cabinets, as well as the cost of purchasing them, and maybe that storage room is costing you more than you thought.

Penalties for Missing Paperwork

On the subject of storage, do you run a business in a regulated industry? Depending on which federal or state agencies oversee your work, there are likely forms and documents they need you to maintain. If you don’t, you’ll be subject to fines from those agencies, or possible legal action from your clients. While this varies widely from industry to industry, a quick call to your business attorney will let you know how much is at stake for any missing documents. 

Environmental Impacts

We all live on the same planet, with the same available resources. And we know those resources are finite, but thanks to exploring new technologies, we’ve been able to move away from our dependence on them. GoFormz is a perfect example of a way to move towards a greener, and leaner, business. While some features can improve your customers’ experience, like electronic signature forms, some features have lasting environmental impacts as well. As of spring of 2022, GoFormz has been able to save nearly 400 million gallons of water used to produce over 18,000 trees worth of paper. Making the switch to digitals forms means your company could be a part of those sustainability efforts, too!

Not only is a greener approach to business a more lasting approach, it can also help you attract new customers. More than ever, people care about the values of the companies with which they do business. Make sure your company doesn’t just believe in environmental-focused policy, but that your business practices support those values. 

Time, Energy, and Staffing

If you have forms, that means you have people filling them out, and managing them – and you’re paying them for every minute they spend doing that. That means instead of making business decisions you’ve hired them to make, they’re focused on reading messy handwriting, searching for missing forms, and filing them away. If you think you’ve solved the problem by using fillable PDFs, unfortunately that’s only addressed the messy handwriting situation. If your data is on a static PDF, that means it can’t be read or analyzed by any other programs. Instead, if you convert a PDF to a fillable form you can now automate where that data goes, without any manual data entry. If you’d like to see how much money all that time saved equates to, check out the GoFormz savings calculator. Simply enter your employees’ wages, and how much time they spend filling out forms, and see exactly how much your business can save with a simple move away from paper forms.

Security From Digital Hackers

While it’s not a risk many consider, the unfortunate fact is that data is valuable. It’s so valuable that there are hackers and organizations that devote their time to stealing it. If your data is still on paper, or if you’re not using a secure platform, it’s at risk. Whether they plan to hold your data hostage for a price or disseminate it publicly, the backlash and cost of recouping that data can be a nightmare. Don’t risk it, and trust a platform like GoFormz with end-to-end data encryption that keeps your data safe. With customizable security settings through limited user access, restricted or open public-facing forms, and even HIPAA-secure features, GoFormz has the security your data needs.