Going paperless can help cities save money when budgets tighten
Many municipalities are now grappling with various budget issues that need to be addressed, and slashing funding to a number of vital programs as a result. However, there may be more wiggle room in these decisions than local officials fully realize, because the ability to go paperless in any one department can result in hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings over the course of any given year.
Simply thinking about the volume of paper and associated supplies a single department goes through each year can help to highlight why the decision to go paperless can be such a significant money-saver. For instance, Montgomery County, Maryland, is facing a $120 million budgetary shortfall this year, and has already proposed $60 million in cuts, according to Bethesda Magazine.
A closer look
Included in that plan is an initiative to push the county's Department of Liquor Control to undertake a transition to paperless document management, which could save the department some $250,000 per year simply by reducing supply costs.
The additional benefit that comes with ongoing document management – employee efficiency – can further add to the savings for an adopting municipality.
Other ideas
Meanwhile, in Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania, a different type of paperless approach seems to be serving the local libraries well, according to the Washington County Observe-Reporter. There, state grants are helping to pay for a number of summer programs that give kids educational options even without heavier investments in traditional programming. Most smaller libraries in the area have annual operating budgets of only about $100,000, and a number of locations have been under threat of closure in recent years.
The ability to wring additional value out of every dollar of funding is critical to cities and towns of all sizes these days, and investing in digitizing documents and setting up automatic robotic processes to ferry information through a document management system quickly and easily can be a critical part of any belt-tightening effort.
If municipal governments can potentially save hundreds of thousands per department with such switches – where applicable – then the sum total of a broad-based conversion effort can be significant, and add up quickly.
