| 5.2 Audit
03. Paper Policy | |
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| 1. Paper Policy: | | 1. Deep long-term strageic planning into the role of paper documents has been undertaken and documented. Policies will evolve fom time to time, but a trend towards the end of paper document storage has been identified. | | 2. Every business will evolve at their own rate, but those that lag behind may suffer greater costs and delayed benefits. | | 3. Legal Status: paper documents and digital documents have identical legal status. Human signatures have very little legal status unless the business can prove that skilled people formally authenticate each and every signature. A digital document can prove its created date and time. A paper document cannot prove what decade it was printed. A digital document can prove it has not been changed. A paper document may have been changed or may have been replaced. |
| 2. Printing: | | 1. The cost of printing is continually increasing as the cost of ink has achieved exceptionally high levels. A decade ago a mono-laser page could be printed for one penny, but today a full colour page can cost 50 pence. While mono-pages may only cost 10 pence, the cost of paper and ink are only moving upwards. | | 2. A cheap printer may only cost 50 pounds and may be replaced each year as the cost of a printer may become comparable to the cost of its ink. The cost of quality paper with a long life may be many times more than cheap paper, but laser ink may fade or drop-off cheap paper in just ten years. |
| 3. Storage: | | 1. Physical storage is the massive hidden cost of paper documents. Paper is heavy and needs strong (expensive) storage cabinets. Paper carries some fire risk and so physical storage should have a degree of fire proofing. | | 2. Physical storage has physical security issues - paper documents can be lost and stolen. To comply with data protection regulations, paper documents must be physically secure and must have restricted access to known people at known times. It is virtually impossible to record when and who accesses paper documents - no evidence trail is created and no proof exists what documents were access by whom. | | 3. Fraud is enabled by replacing historical documents without any trace. Paper documents cannot prove when they was first printed or reprinted - they are not evidence of anything. Human signatures have no significance as any signature can be faked, nobody is skilled to detect a fake and signatures can be added some years later. |
| 4. Backup: | | 1. Business continuity must ask the question of how does the business continue to operate after the building burns to the ground. When all paper documents have been destroyed in some disaster, what happens next. Will the business continue without the paper documents and was storing the paper documents a waste of time, space and cost. | | 2. Every business has a backup-recovery plan, even if the plan is to go out of business when all paper documents are lost in a disaster. A business may choose to take a copy of each document and store it in another physical place. Backup means the cost of each paper document doubles its storage costs, adds copy costs and adds transport costs. |
| 5. Retrieval: | | 1. The cost of paper documents must include the retrieval cost to find a specific document. Whatever reason is document to hold the paper document must include the need to find a specific document at some time in the life of the document. | | 2. Eventually paper documents will expire and they must be destroyed in a safe and secure way. The ability to retrieve the paper documents that need to be destroyed and to safely destroy the paper is an extra operational cost. Until the paper documents expire, they are a liability on the business with costs to maintain, keep secure and eventually destroy. |
| 6. The Digital Evolution: | | 1. It is far cheaper to manage digital documents than paper document. When a business chooses to improve its productivity, improve its cost effectiveness and cut the cost of doing business, then the replacement of paper with digital is critical. | | 2. An initial step is to grant online access to selected business data to customers and suppliers. The benefits are that customers and suppliers are able to eliminate many communication tasks to improve productivity while providing a far better service. By sharing digital data, paper does not need to be created, does not need to be communicated and does not need to be stored. | | 3. People can work from any physical location at any time when all business data is instantly available using online application services. People in this context begins with employees and contractors, but includes customers and suppliers because people do business with other people in many places. | | 4. A well designed application service automatically creates an audit trail of who did what and when - compliant security with negligible costs. Business data is indexed in such a way that nothing can be lost, nothing can be hidden and fraudulent changes can be eliminated. | | 5. Every paper document that has any significance to the business is replicated as digital data - paper is just a low quality backup. Every paper invoice is printed from a digital invoice and could have been accessed online. Every paper timesheet is entered as a digital timesheet and could have been entered online. Every management report is printed from a digital report and could be accessed online. |
| 7. Paper Policy: | | 1. The paper policy is to minimise the use of paper towards zero. The paperless office is a real objective that shall be achieved, but it make take longer than expected. | | 2. The use of paper is an extravagent expense to be reduced with cheaper digitial methods of working. Every paper document is evidence of a poor method of working that can be improved with lower costs and increased productivity. | | 3. Stored paper documents must be replaced with online shared digital documents that cannot be lost of deleted. It can be assumed that some paper documents have been misfiled, have been lost and have been stolen. It can be certain that no digital documents have been misfiled, none can be lost and none can be stolen. | | 4. Business continuity has a viable backup-recovery plan that actually works no matter what the disaster may be. In the event that a data center is not available, business continues to be provided by replicated data in other data centers. People can work from any location at any time, even during a pandemic when travel is restricted. |
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