Paperless KPIs for your business

Going paperless promises a lot of things; it promises better productivity, reduced expenses, saved time, and more for your business. Setting up key performance indicators (KPIs) and monitoring them before and after you go paperless will help you understand if going paperless was the right move for you. Here are a few paperless KPIs you should be tracking for your business.

1. Total Monthly Spend

Total monthly spend is the average amount you spend on all forms of experiences each month. Keep track of all your expenses, such as printing, payroll and subscriptions, then compare your monthly spend from going paperless against what it was before to see if you have reduced your total expenses.

2. Cycle Time

Cycle time is the time needed to complete a certain task or activity. Measure the tasks you often repeat in your business processes, and see if the move to paperless has reduced the time it takes to carry out these tasks, or if it has had the opposite effect.

Remember to consider tasks that are now automated as well, a fully automated task should bring the cycle time down for that task to 0, since no input is required.

3. Gross Profit Margin

Gross profit margin is the percentage of a sale that is “profit” after all the expenses are taken out. To calculate gross profit margin, take the net sale (total sale), then subtract the expenses, such as raw material costs, employee time, etc, and then finally divide your result by the net sales to get your gross profit margin as a percentage.

If you sell a product, or operate a service-based business, use gross profit margin to understand if you’re taking home more profit than before by making the move to paperless.

4. Revenue/Employee

Revenue/employee is the amount of revenue you make, per employee you have. Calculating this is simple; take your total revenue, divide that by the amount of employees you have, and you have your revenue/employee. This metric communicates how much money each employee generates on average for your business, and can be used to compare if going paperless has increased that.

5. Employee Satisfaction

Employee satisfaction gauges the overall workplace sentiment; a happier employee means a happier company, and a happier company operates much more smoothly including benefits such as reduced turnover. Measuring employee satisfaction can be difficult, since it is a bit of an abstract metric, but here are a few questions to consider asking:

• What do you like about working here?
• What do you not like about working here?
• Would you recommend us as a place to work?

Not only does these questions give direct feedback you could address, but you can also use it to gauge where they have a positive, neutral, or negative employee satisfaction. To turn this into a usable metric, subtract the negative responses from the positive responses, then divide the result by the total amount of responses. 

6. Total Project Errors

To measure the accuracy of your work, keep track of the total errors made during a project’s life cycle. This doesn’t need any detail aside from a simple count of how many corrections needed to be made, such as a name spelt wrong during data entry, or a document that needs revising. Compare the total amount of errors made before and after going paperless to see if the transition to paperless has improved accuracy for your business.