How To: Paperless Office
By Daniel Lowrey
How to move your business across the digital divide and into the information age one scanned sheet at a time.
WDaniel Lowrey
e've all seen it: the harried secretary buried beneath a mountain of filing cabinets. He can't find the TPS reports because someone filed them under 'Q' and now he's turned his desk into a paper shredder's graveyard. He scratches his head and wonders, "Wouldn't it be nice if there were a way to automate document filing so I could find things quickly and easily?"
Well there is a way, and F.Y.I. it's not some expensive new technology that just hit your local office supply store's shelves.
As it turns out, digital scanners have been around for several years, but for one reason or another many small businesses have been slow to take advantage of their imaging capabilities. Think of it this way: what if you had a filing gnome who could instantly search the text content of every sheet of paper in your filing cabinets and give you the exact document you ask for? That's what taking your document storage digital means ... not to mention saving immeasurable space, money and headaches from misfiling and human error. What if you could E-Mail documents with a click instead of feeding them through the fax machine and paying for additional phone lines? With the right setup you can even access your documents on the go from the Internet and wow your colleagues as you pull up last month's sales presentation on your cell phone.
Imagine another scenario in which our hapless secretary from the intro has been promoted to sales manager. He's meeting with a big prospect after business hours and the office is closed. The prospect needs to see important support documentation but without a paperless system our poor case study is hung out to dry. A paperless system would have allowed him to put the entire company data vault on a USB flash drive or CD for the meeting, but instead the prospect walks. Doh!
There used to be legitimate concerns about the security, safety and validity of digital files. Those concerns are no longer valid so I will not address them here. Suffice it to say that paperless is where all business is headed and indeed many business leaders are already there. If you haven't yet started eliminating the waste and cost of a paper filing system, what are you waiting for? Whether you're a mom and pop storefront or on the cover of Fortune magazine, a digital office means having access to your business documents and files at any time from anywhere. But how can we achieve this paperless utopia? We'll get to that in a moment. First, a couple of things to remember as you embark:
1. Paperless really means LESS PAPER. Getting rid of everything is a near impossibility.
2. Paperless is a journey, not a destination. Let's establish one thing: you won't be paper-free overnight, especially if you've accumulated years of filing cabinets up to now.
3. A data backup plan is a REQUIREMENT.
4. Re-read Point 3.
5. Plan for data security. Make sure that if you're scanning employee information or other sensitive documents you keep things secure, i.e. don't store scanned social security cards on the company network where anyone who walks into the office with a laptop and a Wi-Fi card can access them. Businesses are responsible for safeguarding private employee information.
6. Finally, paperless is a mindset. It will challenge you to rethink and relearn many tasks that you've performed the same way for years. Simple things like printing documents to a PDF file instead of the inkjet down the hall can be annoying when you start out. However, the end result far outweighs the initial difficulties and once you start seeing how copiers and fax machines hamper productivity you'll wonder how you ever survived a world without your glorious digital archive.
WHAT YOU NEED TO GET STARTED
1. Scanner
Digital scanner prices have fallen drastically. Today you can acquire a very nice model for $300 to $500 dollars. The Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 comes highly recommended. We've used it at New School for almost two years and it's been nothing short of magic. A big bonus with the ScanSnap is its impossibly small footprint; the device occupies only a few inches on your desk and folds up to a more compact form when not being used.
2. Digital File Printer
What does this mean? Think of it in terms of paper: if you want to file a document you send it to the printer and place it in a filing cabinet. Likewise, if you want to file a document in the digital office you have to "print" it.
"But I thought we were doing away with the paper?"
We are. We create digital files the same way we send a document to the paper printer, by selecting a printer in Word or Google Docs or whichever program we use to create our documents. The difference is that when you select your digital file printer as the printing device a "Save File" dialog will appear asking you where to save the document.
I recommend Adobe Acrobat Pro for your file printing solution if you don't mind spending the money, however there are plenty of free digital printers available on the Web. Bullzip's free PDF Printer is a great option.
3. Filing System
Your digital filing system will function exactly the same way as your old metal filing cabinets. Just create an organized system of folders on your computer where you'll store your digital files. This should involve a little planning. For example, let's say I currently store a copy of every invoice I pay in a given year by vendor name alphabetically. These are the only documents I ever scan so my digital filing system will look like this:
*A top level folder for the year named 2009
*Below that a folder named Invoices
*Inside the Invoices directory a folder for each vendor for whom I scan an invoice
When I scan an invoice for a new vendor Ill simply create a new folder with the vendor name and save the scanned invoice in that vendor's folder. All invoices I scan for the rest of 2009 for that vendor will also go in that folder.
4. Naming Conventions
It is important that everyone who "files" documents in your digital archive observe standardized naming conventions so that people who needs to find documents know exactly where to go. For instance you may want to prepend every invoice with its invoice date so that the filename might look like this:
2008.12.01_Invoice_123.pdf
Notice a couple of other things in the above filename. First, we've replaced spaces with underscores. This helps maximize compatibility so that we can access the file from as many different devices as possible. I know underscore characters aren't aesthetically pleasing but spaces in filenames can sometimes create problems when viewed on the web or cell phones or PDA devices so it's just a good practice to replace them.
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