How Much Are Your Filing Cabinets Costing You?

With commercial real estate costs continuing to rise year over year, prices are getting prohibitively expensive for many companies, especially in major metropolitan areas. Today New York City prices are second only to San Francisco in terms of cost per square foot. Real estate costs have a significant impact on the bottom lines of businesses like yours, and often, the space you’re paying such a premium for is being wasted.

For many businesses, a sizeable portion of real estate costs can be attributed to wasted space caused by storing paper in filing cabinets and boxes. But with the average price of real estate ranging anywhere from $30 to over $100 per square foot in New York City, depending upon location, today’s economic conditions demand that office space be used as efficiently as possible to minimize overhead costs and stay competitive.

Going paperless can be just the strategy your business needs to reduce or eliminate those storage costs and save money while you save space.

The Hard Costs of Paper Storage

So how much money is your company actually spending to store paper documents? It depends on how many filing cabinets and boxes you have.

A standard 4-drawer filing cabinet can take up 17 square feet of office space, which includes the size of the unit plus the amount of space needed to access the files inside. If you’re paying $73 per square foot for office space—the average cost in Manhattan—a single filing cabinet costs you $1,241 a year..

Paper’s Hidden Costs

Storing paper documents also costs you in other ways. In fact, paper could be holding your business back from growing and keeping up with the competition. To assess the true costs of keeping filing cabinets around, ask yourself these questions:

• Do you want to reduce your real estate costs in order to invest elsewhere in your company?
• Do you want to improve the appearance of your existing space to better impress your clients, attract staff and communicate a modern, efficient and technically savvy company?
• Do you want to relocate to a better location but can’t afford the same amount of space you currently have?
• Would you have room to expand your services if you eliminated the filing cabinets and storage boxes in your office?
• Are you moving and don’t want to take your paper documents and filing cabinets with you?
• Are you consolidating offices and struggling to combine and organize important documents?
• Do you have staff that spend most of their days filing and could be better utilized elsewhere?
• Do you want to hire more staff but can’t because filing cabinets and document storage boxes are taking up too much room?

If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, your business’ excess paper is costing you, and it’s time to do something about it.

Eliminate Your Paper Problem

How do you tackle the hidden costs of paper and free up the valuable office space your paper documents have been taking up?

Professional scanning services can digitize all of your paper, making it easy to store and access with a document management system hosted on your internal network or in the cloud. According to AIIM, electronic document management halves the storage space needed for paper in just 5 years, resulting in savings of nearly 8% in overall office costs.

The answer is clear. To reallocate money in your budget for value-added expenditures, to improve the efficiency of your office, and to reduce operating costs, go paperless.

Read how document scanning and digitization helped TitleVest, a national title insurance agency in New York City, save $200,000 annually in reclaimed office space!