Office activities such as purchases, sales, payment of salaries, etc., can be recorded in physical and / or electronic form. Although there are electronic vouchers, invoices and other documents, paper is still widely used in offices, especially in small and medium-sized businesses. The sheets of paper are also used to record internal communication within the premises of an office, as well as to communicate the terms and conditions to external persons, or to request any materials. Therefore, most of the office supplies are used in some way in relation to paper.
The list of such stationery includes pens, graphite pencils, highlighters, markers, erasers, crayons, pens, sharpeners, blades, paper cutters and masking tape, masking tapes, scissors, paper clips or clamps, paper graphics pins. , files, folders, trays for storing incoming and outgoing documents, staples and staplers, printer ink, printer ribbon, toner, glue, sticky notes, note holder, etc. Certainly, the list of stationery mentioned above is not exhaustive.
An essential feature of any office supplies is that it is consumed in a short time and cannot be reused. Therefore, a chalk or marker that is used in the conference room to explain and discuss certain strategies would also be stationery, even if it is not used on any paper. However, the blackboard on which something is written with a ballpoint pen can be used for several years. Therefore, the board cannot be classified as a stationery.
This differentiation is, of course, for accounting purposes. There are accounting standards and guidelines for such classification of objects and consumables used in any office space. It can be argued that refills can be used in pens. Again, the regulations would allow for the classification of pens as stationery mainly due to costs. Consumables used in offices are different from consumables used in factory facilities. While the consumables in the manufacturing unit are mixed or integrated into the product that the company sells, such direct consumption of office supplies does not exist. But in the case of companies that offer services, the office supplies are equivalent to the consumables of the manufacturing company.
Over the years, the consumption of office supplies has been reduced due to new electronic tools. But it will be some time before the electronic medium completely replaces paper vouchers and documents. Security and portability are the main reasons to use physical copies of any document such as vouchers, invoices, salary statements, agreements, etc. While a person can carry the information on a laptop or tablet, taking a hard copy of all electronically generated information is good practice because computers can be stolen or damaged. Another drawback is the dependence on energy to retrieve any information electronically. One of the reasons that paper vouchers still exist is the accounting stipulation related to them. The accountant must obtain the recipient’s signatures on the vouchers when payments are made in cash. This is difficult in the electronic environment.
