New start-up scrap metal recycling businesses will often open their doors using spreadsheets and other paper documents to run their operations.
With the high cost of machinery and labor, doing manual record keeping appears to keep costs down. As a scrap yard grows and business increases, sticking with paper documents and spreadsheets will actually impose more costs on your business. A lack of oversight, susceptibility to errors, and loss of productivity will end up costing your scrap yard more money in the long run and make you less competitive.
ScrapWare has provided software to the scrap metal recycling industry for 35 years and understands the advantages and importance of switching from paper and spreadsheets to software made for scrap metal recyclers.
ScrapWare Versus Paper and Spreadsheets
Companies using paper documents can be hesitant to switch to software for a number of reasons. They may think it will be too difficult for their staff and too complicated to set up and install. They may worry about the cost. Some fear that a digital system will somehow make their data more vulnerable. In fact, the opposite is true. Sticking with paper and spreadsheets is actually more cumbersome for your employees, will drive up your costs with poor decision making and loss of productivity, and expose your data to human error and physical loss or damage to paper documents.
The comparative analysis below explores these issues.
Save Time: Invoices, settlement statements, shipping documents, quotes, contracts, spreadsheet files and accounting forms are just some of the paper documents your staff must complete by hand if your yard runs on paper. Employees will spend much more time filling out and filing these forms than they would completing a digital document.
With ScrapWare software, data can be entered once and stored for future transactions or moved onto the next step in your process. For instance, information from a quote can be transferred to a new document when it becomes a contract. These electronic documents are faster (and cheaper) than paper documents to edit, change and redistribute to customers, vendors and employees.
Streamline and Accelerate Important Business Processes: ScrapWare’s digital documents can be moved from person to person more quickly than paper documents. They can be viewed by many people at the same time. Mistakes are more easily and quickly caught and corrected. All these benefits remove bottle necks in your business process and reduce the time of approval cycles so you can speed up and increase the volume of your business.
Simplify Interactions with Vendors and Customers: If a company relies on paper documents, it must physically deliver this paperwork to customers and vendors, which is slower and less convenient. With ScrapWare’s online documents, customers and vendors can access them when it is convenient and address them from any location. They can sign paperwork digitally and print copies when and if they are needed. Having a paperless option for your customers and vendors improves their experience with your business.
Make Finding Documents Faster and Easier: Paper documents must be filed and stored by your staff, a time-consuming job to put away and to retrieve. Using ScrapWare allows users to store documents digitally, making it easier to find them online instead of digging through file drawers. Answers to inquiries from customers, vendors, government entities and staff are available at everyone’s fingertips.
Protect Documents: Paper documents are vulnerable to damage and loss. Fires, floods and theft could ruin and destroy your business records. Using ScrapWare protects electronic records from getting lost or damaged from a disaster.
Improve Security: Just as paper documents are vulnerable to theft, they are similarly vulnerable to breaches of security. Paperwork can easily be stolen or altered. Confidential data or sensitive information is much more secure stored as an electronic document on an off-site cloud server as it is with ScrapWare.
Additional Benefits of ScrapWare versus Paper and Spreadsheets
- Save money and physical storage space: The improvements in these processes lead to cost savings. They also save physical storage space and clean up clutter, eliminating the need for rooms full of filing cabinets.
- Improved compliance: In addition, scrap metal recyclers can also benefit from improved compliance with state and local laws. Having stored digital images of licenses, signatures and fingerprints can help companies comply with anti-theft regulations, work with authorities and protect themselves from mistakes.
- Benefits from operating in the cloud: ScrapWare gives its customers access to operating in the cloud. By storing information and operating in the cloud, important files and documents can be saved and accessed anytime using online storage. Automatic data backups will make sure information stored online is not lost. Storing documents in the cloud allows files to be shared any time, with all users having access to the information remotely. Finally, cloud storage is scalable, meaning storage capacity can be increased or decreased as the needs of a business grow or change.
- Access to e-signatures: Signing contracts and agreements no longer requires printing out long documents to obtain a few signatures. E-signatures are legally binding, but are significantly more efficient, convenient, faster to use, safer and more secure than obtaining a traditional signature. ScrapWare facilitates the use of e-signatures for all contracts and documents.
- Access to a cashless payment system: ScrapWare allows scrap metal recyclers to pay their vendors with its new cashless payment interface with Paysign. With the Paysign interface, recyclers can pay vendors using reloadable Mastercard prepaid cards instead of cash or check. Vendors getting a Paysign prepaid card can use it to withdraw cash or make purchases. This gives scrap metal recyclers the option to reduce the expense and hassle of keeping large amounts of cash on hand or exposing themselves to check fraud.
The benefits of using ScrapWare versus paper documents and spreadsheets have inspired many scrap yards to use this software designed specifically for their business. ScrapWare’s 35 years of experience with recycling companies can help them get the right software up and running for your business so that you can start reaping the rewards of increased productivity and greater oversight. This will allow you to control your costs, make good decisions, and improve your competitiveness and profitability.
This card is issued by Patriot Bank, N.A., member FDIC, pursuant to a license from Mastercard, and is serviced by Paysign, Inc.
About ScrapWare Corporation: Since 1989, Rockville, Maryland-based ScrapWare Corporation has been the software of choice for the recycling industry. Its ease of installation and simplicity saves users time and money while helping them achieve compliance and maintain accurate business insights. With state-of-the-art functionality tailored to each organization’s unique requirements, ScrapWare is an advanced dynamic software solution that alleviates the most pressing recycling industry worries. For more information, please call (301) 517-8500 or visit https://www.scrapware.com/.