Debtfree Magazine March 2017

The cost of
printing and paper
The cost of printing and paper is a major part of most Debt
Counselling firms’ overheads and the smaller the firm the bigger
the overhead.
In 1999 Bill Gates said “The paperless office, like artificial intelligence, is one of those ‘any
day now’ phenomena that somehow never seem to actually arrive.” 18 years later in 2017
this is still largely true and we have to ask ourselves why. There are two reasons – human
and technological.
HUMAN
Here’s the truth. I have owned a tablet for nearly six years now. I confidently use it to
get stuff off the internet and even to do my banking and yet I still get my Sunday Times
delivered every week and I still go to the bookshop to buy books. The reason? Well actually
I like spreading the paper out and I like the smell and feel of the book in my hand. It is
familiar and it is comfortable, so why would I want to read on a piece of technology even
if it is better?
This is called resistance to change, the natural instinct to stay with what is comfortable
and is the number one stumbling block to getting rid of the paper.
Technology
There are a number of technical issues that have stood in the way of the realisation of
digital offices. These centre around the quality of the document image of a scanned
document, the concern about the ease at which am electronic document can be