When a business starts adding up what paper forms cost, it usually starts with the printer. What the ink costs, whether a laser would be cheaper, how many reams of A4 the office gets through. Do the sums though and the printing turns out to be the cheap part. The real bill is somewhere else.
The printing bill
For an illustrative calculation, assume 5p per printed page, including paper. A five-person field team doing fifteen jobs a week each, with two pages per job, would print 7,800 pages over 52 weeks. At that assumed cost, the annual printing bill is £390. Use your own costs and working weeks for a comparison that fits your business.
If that were the whole story, paper forms would just be an untidy habit.
The retyping bill
The bigger cost starts once the sheet is filled in. It rides around in a van, eventually reaches the office, and then someone types it up. Call it ten minutes per job to chase, read and re-enter the details. For the same five-person team that’s 75 jobs a week at ten minutes each: over twelve hours of admin every week, roughly 650 hours a year. At an assumed £14 an hour that’s around £9,000 a year, spent typing out information the team had already written down once.
The bills nobody itemises
Some costs never make it onto a spreadsheet at all. Invoices that go out days late because the proof of work is still in a van. The job sheet that never makes it back, and the unbillable return visit that follows. The archive boxes, the filing time, the office space given over to old paperwork. The audit request that turns into a search party.
What changes when the forms go digital
Move the same forms onto a phone and the picture changes. The job sheet is completed on site with photos, signature, GPS and timestamp attached. It syncs to the office the moment it’s done. Nobody retypes anything, the invoice can go out the same day, and every record files itself, searchable whenever you need it. The print bill doesn’t shrink. It disappears.
Want your own number? Jobs per week, times the minutes spent retyping each one. That figure, not the ink, is what paper is costing you. It’s also roughly what going paperless gives you back. See our packages or get in touch and we’ll work it out with you.