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In this era of rising operating costs, landscape contractors are looking for ways to remove waste from their operations on both the production and administrative sides of the coin. Turning your office into a paperless communications center can help reduce labor hours, eliminate missed billing opportunities, cut down on stress and improve customer satisfaction.

Any piece of paper a company would normally file—including estimates, contracts, customer notes, materials bills, etc.—can be scanned and filed on the computer, resulting in less office clutter, less time wasted searching for files, and less money spent on paper and printer ink.

Landscape companies that would benefit most from a paperless office would be generating at least $500,000 in annual revenue, according to Dickran Babigian, president of consulting and software firm Navix. More importantly, the company would have at least one dedicated office staff member who would be responsible for scanning documents into the computer, etc. "Realistically, the owner would be too busy to dedicate the amount of time necessary," Babigian explains.

Still, as Glenn Zior of CLIP Software and CLIP Lawn Care points out, you'd be hard-pressed to find any contractor who wished he had more paperwork sitting around. "When I visit contractors, even the smaller companies, virtually all of them say they wish they could go paperless," Zior relates. "They are receptive to the idea, for sure. It's just a matter of execution. The dollar investment can actually be pretty low. The main investment is in time. But when you think about it, it really doesn't have to be that much of an undertaking, and the time saved later on can more than make up for it."

TRACKING COSTS, ESTIMATES AND CUSTOMER INFORMATION

CLIP Lawn Care has had an almost 100-percent paperless office since day one. Today, even with contracts, the paper copy goes right in the trash once it's scanned into the computer. The next step is to get 100 percent of customer bills sent via e-mail, although many are being sent that way already. "I think most customers will be receptive to this," Zior says.

The only thing that isn't paperless at CLIP Lawn Care is accounts payable, though that too may change soon. "The IRS now allows a PDF scan as a legitimate receipt," Zior explains. "So materials bills and other receipts could also go paperless now, making it much easier for contractors to keep track of these things and recover the costs."

As Babigian points out, the main objective in going paperless is to store vital information in a more orderly fashion, and make that information readily accessible to yourself and other members of your staff. To get things started, estimates are a good first step.

Zior agrees, saying, "The biggest issue is finding the estimate when a customer calls. Understandably, busy contractors have a growing pile of 'to be filed' paperwork … namely estimates. It's not always a quick process to get an answer back to the customer. With an electronic filing system, it can be more orderly and much faster."

MowCow Lawn & Landscape in Fairfax Station, VA, has recently begun heading in the paperless direction for this very reason. "We wanted important documents like estimates and notes from the field to be easier to find, while also reducing the chance of their getting permanently lost," owner Richard Lindsay says. "Even with the best paper filing system, things always seem to get misplaced."

Post-it notes also lend themselves well to a paperless system. "You want to be able to retrieve and share notes on customers and specific phone calls without having to dig out a paper file or track someone else down in the office," Babigian says. "The goal is to get rid of all those notes around the office, which are easily lost, forgotten or simply not legible."