Reducing paperwork
The True Cost of Paperwork: How Much Is Your School Spending on Stationery?
Paper, printing and registers are only the visible part of what paperwork costs a school. Here is a simple way to add up the real figure, including staff hours, and where reducing paperwork in school administration pays back first.
The Onflows team5 min read
Most schools know roughly what they spend on stationery. Very few know what their paperwork actually costs, because the largest part of the bill never appears on a stationery invoice. It appears as staff hours.
This post gives you a simple way to estimate the true cost of paperwork in your school, using your own numbers, and shows where reducing paperwork in school administration pays back fastest.
The three layers of paperwork cost
1. The visible cost: paper, printing and registers
This is the line on the budget: reams of paper, toner, printed registers, receipt books, report card stock, admission forms, circulars and certificates. It is real, but it is usually the smallest of the three.
A quick way to estimate it: take last year's stationery and printing spend, then add the cost of any printed books (registers, receipt books, diaries) bought from a vendor. Many schools are surprised to find that circulars alone, sent home to every family several times a term, are one of the bigger items.
2. The hidden cost: staff time
Every paper process involves someone writing, copying, carrying, filing or looking something up. To estimate it, list your paper processes and ask the person who does each one how long it takes in a normal week:
| Process | Who does it | Typical weekly effort to ask about |
|---|---|---|
| Attendance registers and totals | Class teachers, office | Marking, totalling, monthly summaries |
| Fee receipts and ledgers | Accounts | Writing receipts, reconciling, chasing dues |
| Report cards | Teachers, office | Copying marks, checking totals, reprints |
| Circulars | Office | Drafting, printing, distributing, re-sending |
| Certificates | Office | Typing, signing, keeping a copy |
| Admission forms | Front desk | Filling, copying, filing documents |
Multiply the hours by a fair hourly cost for each role and by the number of working weeks in the academic year. In most schools this figure is several times the stationery bill.
3. The risk cost: errors, loss and audits
Paper has costs that only show up when something goes wrong:
- Errors: a mark copied wrongly onto a report card, a fee recorded against the wrong student, a total that does not add up.
- Loss: a register that goes missing, a receipt book damaged by water, a file nobody can find during an inspection.
- Audit effort: rebuilding a record for a board inspection or an auditor from several paper sources.
These are hard to put a number on, but they are the costs principals mention first once they have lived through one.
A worked example you can adapt
Here is an illustration, not a benchmark. Replace each figure with your own.
Say a school has 20 classes. If each class teacher spends about 10 minutes a day on the paper register and its monthly totals, that is over 3 staff hours a day across the school, before the office has touched it. Add fee receipts on fee days, report card copying at the end of each term and circular printing, and the paper workload runs to hundreds of staff hours across the academic year. At almost any salary level, that dwarfs what the school spends on paper.
The point of the exercise is not the exact number. It is seeing which process is the most expensive in your school, because that is where to start.
Where reducing paperwork pays back first
From what we see in schools, the order is usually:
- Attendance. It happens every day, in every class. Moving it to a phone or laptop removes the most repeated paper task in the school.
- Fees. Receipts generated from a fee ledger are faster on fee day and remove month-end reconciliation. We wrote about preventing queues on fee collection day.
- Report cards. A gradebook that produces the progress card ends the copying, which is where most report card errors come from.
- Circulars. A digital notice board with read receipts replaces printing and tells you who has seen the notice.
Our earlier post on manual school tasks you should automate covers each of these in more detail.
What about free templates and spreadsheets?
Many schools start by moving paper to spreadsheets. That cuts printing but not the copying: the same name still lives in many files, and nothing connects the attendance sheet to the report card. Spreadsheets are a good step, and a free school ERP built on Excel can work for a very small school, but the copying cost remains.
If you are not ready to move yet, our free templates (report card, fee receipt, attendance register and transfer certificate formats) at least make the paper consistent.
Frequently asked questions
How much paper does a school use in a year?
It depends heavily on how many circulars, forms and registers are printed. Rather than rely on a national average, add up your own stationery and printing invoices for the last academic year; it takes an hour and gives you a figure you can trust.
Does going paperless mean buying expensive software?
Not necessarily. Some school management software has free plans. Onflows' Community plan is free with no time limit for smaller schools, and covers the roll, admissions, notices, certificates and progress cards. See pricing for what each plan includes.
What should a school keep on paper?
Keep whatever your board or local authority requires in signed physical form, and anything a family needs to sign. Everything else can live digitally, provided it is backed up and access is controlled.
Want to see your own school without the paper? Create your school on Onflows and import your roll from a spreadsheet.
Topics: Reducing paperwork, School administration, School ERP, Costs