You might not realize it, but the majority of the information you get and use in your personal and professional life is digital. Consider the articles you read, your bills, and your interactions with others (coworkers, friends, and family alike): how much of it is still done on paper?
Despite this, most information in the construction industry—where there is a rising number of valuable technology tools—is still in paper form. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, construction is one of the least digital industries, trailing only agriculture and hunting.

If your company is like most in the industry, your information is most likely stored in paper file folders, rows of filing cabinets, or a rarely visited office. Except, of course, when a new project is completed and more files are added to the mix.

Change Is Difficult, But Not Changing Has A Cost

It's understandable why so many people still use paper files. Paper has been used by your company for as long as you have been in business. Because it's second nature, you've probably never considered the costs of printing and storing paper files, but they mount up.

Furthermore, digitizing those old files and creating an entirely new system takes time and necessitates a big shift in how you do things. And change is difficult to sell to those who have done things the same way for years.

While it's simple to anticipate how difficult a full-scale digitization effort would be, the costs of sustaining the status quo must also be considered. Here are five ways your paper files are costing you money.

1. Document Administration

Paper is not particularly expensive. On Amazon, you can acquire 1,500 sheets for less than $15. However, the cost of buying reams of paper and managing all of your paperwork quickly mounts up.

According to one study, businesses can pay up to $27,000 per year to print and handle an average of 5,000 pages each month. Worse, an estimated 50% of all printed pages are never ever looked at—a figure that may be even higher when it comes to outdated building project data.

2. Ink

Printer ink is one of the most expensive substances you can buy, even if you don't realize it. It costs more than $50 per ounce than Dom Pérignon Champagne. All those documents in your office's file cabinets contain a modest fortune on their pages. And every time your company prints out all of your project documentation, you're spending more money to get those words and numbers on the page.

3. Printing Devices

A commercial printer costs between $1,500 and $35,000 to purchase and $85 to $900 per month to lease. You might believe that if you spend that money once, you're done paying for the printer.

Wrong. You must also consider maintenance expenditures in addition to the printer's purchase price, such as the high cost of ink. Maintenance also covers the time employees spend dealing with printing issues. When the printer jams or runs out of ink, someone must take the time to repair it. Your IT personnel can spend their time more effectively, and you can spend your money more wisely.

4. Storage

This does not even take into account the space taken up by the rows of filing cabinets. Your office is most likely one of the most expensive items in your budget. While prices vary depending on location, the average in locations such as San Francisco and New York City is more than $5 per square foot.

Even though your occupancy charges are lower, each square foot of your workplace costs you money each month. So making the most of the space isn't just being responsible; it's also being clever. To put it another way, those file cabinets are taking up valuable office space that could undoubtedly be better utilized. And you thought those filing cabinets were just a nuisance.

5. Availability

How frequently do you return to those paper files in their current state? It may appear that your lack of access to the information is insignificant. However, it comes with a cost. The National Technical Information Service decided to put a price on paper files, discovering that each five-drawer file cabinet costs you $880 each year.

When your old project files are stored in boxes or filing cabinets, your team must spend hours searching for the right document at the precise moment it may be valuable to them. Or, more likely, they simply avoid accessing old papers altogether.

That would be OK if there wasn't much there to begin with. However, your paper files may contain a plethora of essential information. If you save your real, as-built project expenses in file cabinets, you'll be able to provide faster, more accurate estimates.

Benchmarking Costs: How Digitizing Records Pays Off

It's bad enough that your paper project files are costing you money, but they could also be limiting your capacity to earn more. You're passing up a huge opportunity if you can't access the information they have.

Right now, it's a reasonable assumption that your estimators rarely use outdated project files to generate estimates. They've probably established their own cost-estimating system based on tribal knowledge or informed assumptions. If that's how they've always done it, it may seem adequate. However, this is only because they haven't seen how much better their estimations can be using cost benchmarking.

Cost benchmarking enables you to create and compare estimates by using the costs of similar projects as a guide. You can increase your confidence in the competitiveness of your pricing by making your estimates in this manner.

Some companies base their cost benchmarking on industry averages. Creating cost benchmarks based on your own as-built expenses, on the other hand, is a significantly more accurate and efficient method. When you think about it, it seems obvious that using your own data would help you to be more precise in your estimates because they are based on how your organization actually performs the task.

Begin With Cost Benchmarking

When your as-built expenses are kept in file folders, accessing that information to inform your estimations is a mammoth endeavor. However, by digitizing your project data, you can create a historical cost database for cost benchmarking.

When your estimators have easy access to data-backed cost standards, they will begin delivering more accurate estimates in a fraction of the time. More accurate estimates lead to more competitive bids and lucrative projects.

When your projects go as planned, the owners with whom you deal are more likely to be pleased with the results. This benefits your reputation and expands your future commercial chances.