Many businesses, especially smaller businesses, are hesitant to buy laptop scanners, business card scanners, and other such office devices. Sticker price scares them, and using a laptop scanner can take time. Furthermore, digital filing systems are expensive to implement, and difficult to design. In fact, a February study of 882 companies found more than half believe paper is needed for legal reasons, according to AIIM.

Before one dismisses laptop scanners and other equipment as luxuries, one must consider the waste paper filling has. Knowledge workers spend 15 to 30 percent of their time finding information. In fact, the typical business has 19 copies in each document, spends 20 USD in labor to file each document, 120 USD to search for misfiled documents, and completely loses one in every twenty documents, according to PriceWaterhouseCooper. Once lost, companies invest 25 man hours recreating documents. Furthermore, each employee uses 10,000 sheets a year, according to reduce.org.

Laptop scanners and other portable scanners may be investments up front, but they cut wastes. In fact, CRN estimates that small businesses will invest 100 billion in USD by 2014, mostly to cut waste. With such advances, laptop scanners, other scanners and digital filing systems are becoming more economical, and save more labor. See more.