When you consider the first email was sent in 1971 and the first photograph uploaded to the web in 1992, businesses have had a long time to start their digital journey and to join a paperless revolution. So, why is paper still with us?

It’s clear that digital transformation brings many benefits and that starting on the journey is critical for businesses around the world.

But look around you and despite advances in technology and so many businesses ‘going digital’ we still see paper records being stored in every country – and many companies now choosing a ‘paperlite’ option in which digital and physical sits side by side.

Here are the five biggest reasons why physical records haven’t gone away – and why they won’t be disappearing any time soon:

1 The cost of digital transformation
Scanning records is an effective starting point for digital transformation, ensuring documents are easily accessible online and can be quickly retrieved when needed.

But scanning can be daunting for businesses which store millions of documents, especially those that lack a big budget for digital transformation.

If you take the cost of storing a physical box versus the cost of digitising, it will take about 16 years before there is a return on the investment of going digital.

2 So many files you want to keep – but never need
Businesses are especially reluctant to scan everything if the documents they keep are not regularly required or retrieved.

If you only need them once every few years, where is the value in scanning every document? Some businesses keep documents which may never be needed – or sit in storage for decades before access is required. So, it makes good sense to keep heritage documents on paper and scan those you require most often.

3 Wet signatures still legally required for some documents
There are still documents which require a ‘wet’ signature by law in case they need to be produced in future. Wills and power of attorney, adoptions, court orders, evictions and mortgages all require a wet signature, for example.

Birth certificates, marriage and civil partnership certificates and decree absolute divorce papers, are just a few examples of the documents that are still legally required to be kept on paper, too.

4 A fear of tackling historic culture
When you store documents in physical form over many years, a culture develops within a business around how they are used, how they are retrieved and how they are valued – and that’s a difficult culture to change quickly.

Businesses often fear that a digital solution won’t fit with the culture of the organisation. We’ve seen this first hand in the NHS, where Trusts have gone digital but then found that clinicians still prefer paper patient records and notes. The answer is often to take digital transformation one step at a time, beginning with scan on demand and growing into a hybrid system.

5 Authenticity is higher for paper records
There’s something trustworthy and authentic about a paper record with a wet signature, that provides assurance.

The rise of cybercrime and security breaches online also adds to a feeling that keeping your documents on paper in a secure building provides fewer risks.

There have always been breaches, of course – we’ve all heard stories about confidential paper documents being left on trains. But the size of cyberattacks is something else, with the global cost of cybercrime is expected to reach 10.5 trillion US Dollars by 2025, according to a Cybersecurity Ventures report in 2020. ^[1]

In the end the big challenge for businesses is to optimise their inventory, and that can often be done without a full digital transformation process.

Scan on demand, online portals that provide quick access to files and digitisation of the records that are needed most often are good examples.

So, do we see a time when paper records no longer exist? Not any time soon.

[1] https://cybersecurityventures.com/hackerpocalypse-cybercrime-report-2016/#:~:text=Cybersecurity%20Ventures%20expects%20global%20cybercrime,%243%20trillion%20USD%20in%202015.