According to management consultants McKinsey & Company, government analysts believe that governments could save more than $1 trillion annually by going paperless wherever possible. Because software solutions allow municipalities to receive, store, secure and manage data, the public can gain improved access to pertinent information while saving taxpayer money.

Find out why it’s in your municipality’s best interest to go paperless.

Benefits of Going Paperless

Creating a paperless municipality provides a variety of benefits. For instance, documentation required for accountability is more efficiently and accurately recorded than documentation done manually. Information is shared among departments rather than siloed, resulting in better tracking and use of data. Municipalities gain better insight into processes and constituency behaviors by going paperless rather than using manual methods. Remote access to data means having departments use the information for different purposes and increasing its value. Municipalities save a significant amount of money by purchasing less paper, printer cartridges, and staples. Employees save time by not stapling and passing out packets for meetings and searching for, updating or sharing physical files.

Reasons to Go Paperless

Paperless solutions offer multiple benefits for a municipality. For instance, electronic programs streamline data entry and increase efficiency for business processes. Spending less time on processing forms frees up time for more important responsibilities. Employees experience better workflows, faster responses, fewer errors, and better outcomes when going paperless. Automation means removing steps and tasks along a project’s journey, tracking project status, notifying relevant people when reaching a milestone, and creating reminders to avoid having tasks get bottlenecked. Citizens enjoy conveniently accessing information online. With mobile- and search-friendly software solutions, staff easily track down council meeting minutes, applications, reports, and other pertinent information. Securely storing documents in the cloud means having a reliable backup for information. Centralized documents mean all departments work together with the same information, improving access, management and decision-making using the data. Less space is needed to store physical documents.

Steps to Go Paperless

When your municipality decides to go paperless, begin by aligning your goals for digital transformation with your government’s overall priorities. Figure out which manual tasks you want to eliminate, the information you want to share among departments, and how you can engage more constituents while making better decisions and reducing operating costs. You want to manage agendas, meetings, boards, and records along with a civic web portal or other citizen apps. You also need to form a process for regularly evaluating your digital programs to adjust as needed. A government software company can facilitate this process.

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