“When the Bottom Line Is Buried in Paper”

OfficeDrop’s customer, Unique Cleaning Services, was interviewed by the New York Times Small Business Section about how they use OfficeDrop to decrease the their company’s dependence on paper.

Willie "Toney" Sellers, Jr., President, Unique Cleaning Services

Willie “Toney” Sellers, Jr., President of Unique Cleaning (and Wayne Goodman, his CFO) spoke with David Freedman of the Times. With an operation distributed around 13 states and Puerto Rico, Unique Cleaning needed help managing all the paper generated from employee travel, customer invoices and vendor paperwork. Here is part of the article; click the link below to see the full piece:

Mr. Sellers operates Unique Cleaning Service, a janitorial and maintenance firm based in Marietta, Ga. With about 50 employees servicing nearly 200 commercial and government client sites spread across 13 southern states and Puerto Rico, one of the company’s largest non-salary costs is travel, especially for the firm’s four constantly on-the-road quality-control inspectors. “We were having a lot of trouble tracking and finding receipts,” said Mr. Sellers. “If the I.R.S. challenged us, we’d be spending a lot of time digging through papers.”

The company first looked into buying scanners and special software designed to make it easy to organize scanned receipts, like the NeatReceipts offerings you may have seen at airports. But while that sort of solution seems appealing for a modest flow of paper receipts, Mr. Sellers feared it would be insufficient for the torrent his employees were generating. He pictured employees sitting around for hours feeding receipts into scanners and leaving the company with a mess of online documents.

Turns out, though, you can outsource your paper problems. A company called OfficeDrop lets you ship your boxes of paper receipts and other documents to them, and they’ll scan the mess and make it all available online as organized, searchable documents. Unique Cleaners now uses OfficeDrop for all of its receipts, as well as for all of its customer and vendor paperwork. “We try to get everyone to deal with us by e-mail, but not everyone is set up that way,” Mr. Sellers said. In fact, even when orders, invoices and other transactions do come via e-mail, the company forwards them to OfficeDrop, so it can add them to the scanned documents to provide a single, integrated, organized view of all documents. Mr. Sellers doesn’t even want the papers back for archival storage — he just has OfficeDrop shred them.

Unique Cleaning pays OfficeDrop about $100 a month, and Mr. Sellers figures he’s freed up his office’s administrative assistant from having to spend a chunk of her day dealing with paper, making it a good deal in his eyes for that reason alone. The bigger payoff might actually come from avoiding potential audit, order and invoice problems related to misplaced paper, but it can be hard to judge what cost to assign to that risk. Perhaps it’s enough to say that if you’re concerned about it, you probably should do something about it.

OfficeDrop and Unique Clean in the New York Times