Do you have an office relocation looming in your future? If your office is like most others, you probably have boxes and cabinets filled with paper records you’ve accumulated over the years. When you’re getting ready for a move, a major consideration is what you need to take with you. Moving or rearranging a single room is a hassle already, but an entire office is its own journey! To relieve some of the pain of moving, scanning hard copy files to digital is an option that lets you take the data with you to your new location while not having to worry about the physical copies.
Costs Of Moving Offices
There are multiple costs when it comes to an office relocation: money, effort, and time. These costs can add up quickly and take a toll on your organization’s resources if you’re not careful.
General moving costs
Moving offices is costly. According to the Professionals Moving Specialists:
- Moving about 1,500 square feet of office space can range from $750 to $4,500, depending on furniture and materials to move.
- Packing and moving a 3,000 square feet space can range from $1,500 to $9,000.
- And for a 10,000 square foot space, the price climbs from $5,000 to $30,000.
These numbers are just estimates, but you’ll probably have to allot more budget to prepare for anomalies and extra costs that can incur during the move.
Time wasted packing & organizing files
To be able to transport your records, you’ll need your employees or a moving company to pack up your hard copy files first. And once you get to the new office, you’ll need to unpack, reshelve, and re-organize your documents. Moving offices is already disruptive to your employee’s work and it becomes even more so if they need to spend time to manually organize the records at the new office.
Hassle of transportation
When you’re planning for transportation, there’s more to it than hiring a moving company, putting your documents into a truck, and driving it to your new office. You need to consider ways to ensure your records are safe during transport and think about how to organize them in a way that’s clear so you’ll decrease the chance of misplacing them during the move and making it easier to file when you get to your new office.
Risk of loss
During a relocation, it’s common for paper records to be misplaced or lost because of physical handling or transportation. According to AIIM, it takes $220 in labor to reproduce a lost document. The possibility of losing important documents can be damaging for some organizations.
What You Can Do – Digitize Your Records
Now that we’ve mentioned the costs and potential risks of an office move, you may want to know what you can do to make your move easier and still bring everything you need with you. Digitizing or scanning your records before the big move is the optimal solution.
When you scan your records prior to moving, you’ll have digital files instead of physical documents, which means that you’ll have less to move while maintaining all your important data. This allows you to safeguard your data and modernize your document management methods at the same time, making you less dependent on physical files in the future. Digitization will not only make your relocation smoother, but it’ll benefit your organization in many ways after the move.
Benefits Of Digitizing Documents Before A Move
Every organization will benefit differently, but below are five common benefits that we associate with digitizing your records before you move offices.
1. Lower moving costs
If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that the more files, cabinets, and boxes you have to move, the more expensive it’s going to be to bring them with you. The math is simple: if you want to decrease the cost of your relocation, then the easiest alternative is by digitizing your records. If you have your files in electronic format, you won’t need to pay a moving company to physically move and transport your records. You can save that money to transport furniture, equipment, and other important things.
Your most immediate investment will be to scan your paper records. Once you complete your digitization project, you’ll lower your transportation cost and could potentially eliminate extra storage costs in the long run. Read our article on paper scanning costs to get a better idea of the price range and cost factors to scan a box of paper.
2. Lower risk of losing documents
No matter how organized and careful you are, it’s likely that some records will be misplaced or lost during the relocation. By digitizing your files before a move, you can create multiple physical backups to reduce the risk of loss (such as on USB drives) or store your electronic files in a cloud-hosted system, allowing you to simply access the records from the internet.
3. Save time
In the business world, time is precious. Digitizing your records before your relocation can save you a lot of time, effort, and hassle in unpacking, reshelving, and re-organizing your documents once you get to your new office. This wastes the time of your employees who could be working on their primary tasks instead of acting as temporary movers.
4. More office space to use at your new location
A huge benefit of digitizing your files before a move is that you won’t have to use up your floor space to store physical records. By determining which documents you should scan and which you should store, you can save a lot of space if you no longer have to keep all of your physical records.
5. Decrease maintenance costs for physical records
With your documents digitized, you can save on the cost of maintenance. For example, you can say goodbye to spending money on locked cabinets, rooms to prevent unauthorized access, temperature and humidity-controlled storage, or waterproof/ fireproof storage technology.
Working With A Scanning Partner
It’s best to start thinking about digitization as early as possible because document scanning takes time. You don’t want to be stuck transporting something you’d rather have made digital. And even worse, you don’t want to get to the new office and think “why did I move this with me and not get rid of it or scan it before?”.
To digitize your records, it’ll be best to team up with a scanning partner that has the equipment, processes, and knowledge needed to seamlessly execute your digital conversion project. The earlier you work with a scanning partner, you’ll be more likely to completely digitize your records before your move, leaving you with one less thing to worry about. And even if there’s not enough time to complete the project before you move offices, it’s often possible to have your records picked up and stored in secure storage at the scanning facility during the project so you won’t have to deal with them during the relocation.
To find the right scanning partner for your project, you’ll have to research and contact a couple of scanning companies with your project specifications. Be sure to mention the timeline of your relocation.
If you choose us as your scanning partner, we have the capabilities to handle every aspect of the document scanning project, from transportation, preparation, scanning, data extraction, delivery, and hosting. You’ll be working closely with one of our sales reps to create a scope of work. Once the scope of work has been agreed upon, they’ll create a custom conversion process flow for your project that meets your requirements and ensures you’re getting what you need.
After creating your custom project flow, we’ll start scanning your documents with our 9-step paper scanning process. Our process covers transportation, preparation, scanning, post-imaging processing, indexing, and more. By the end of the project, you’ll have your records in a digital format that you won’t have to worry about moving again!
Conclusion
Digitizing your documents before your move gives your employees a fresh start to look forward to in your new office. It’s an opportunity to modernize your business and its processes. Digitizing your paper documents is a worthwhile investment and one that will pay off in the time saved, decreased liability, and less maintenance. The time to digitize your records is now!
Next Steps
Reach out to us today! Click the “Get Your Quote” button below, fill out the form, and we’ll quickly reply to you to discuss your project.
Further Reading
Below are some other articles you can read to learn more about records digitization.
“Breaking Down The Box: How To Approach Your Paper Scanning Project” reviews every component you need to consider when you start thinking about doing a paper digitization project, from document types, page conditions, and more.
“What Are The Advantages Of Digitization?” lists out the benefits of having your records in a digital format rather than maintaining the physical records. Digitally converting documents into an electronic format is a way to safeguard your important materials and provide you with quick and easy access when you need them.
“How Do I Access My Records During My Conversion Project?” describes what would happen in a scenario if you needed to access certain records during a conversion project. Even though your office is dealing with a move, your employees still need to access records to do their jobs. This article will help you prepare for these types of situations.