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The "Paperless Office"

How to deal with this ever-growing mountain of paper?

For a long time now businesses have been drowning in paper. Certain types of small businesses, especially law firms, generate a shocking amount of hard copy. What to do with all of it? Where to store all of it?

More important, how to pay for this ever-growing mountain of paper that must be stored and maintained for productivity or compliancy reasons?

Storage costs for large volumes of hard copy can be expensive. It is also extremely impractical given enough volume. Retrieving an important piece of information from the great slush pile of paper stored in a rental unit can be an all but futile endeavor. If your company is ever audited, who is going to dredge through all that hard copy? . . .

Hard copy eats up valuable and limited office space. Over the course of a year, think about how much all this paper is costing you, in terms of storage, office space, shredding, filing, printer and copier maintenance, toner cartridges, paper reams, not to mention loss in productivity.

Chances are that if you own or lease a relatively modern and capable copier machine, you already have half of the equation settled: you have a means of converting hard copy documents into electronic documents. If your copier machine is capable of scanning-to-email, FTP or SMB, it does have this capability. In the end how robust your scanning solution needs to be depends on the volume of hard copy you need to scan. There are dedicated scanners tailored for smaller budgets. The Fugitsu SnapScan models are good choices for small business and the S510M model will set you back around $500. If your volume is very light, a simple and inexpensive multifunction printer might do the trick.

The Fugitsu SnapScan S510M.

An important thing to bear in mind, in your pursuit of the paperless office, is that you do not have to go paperless all at once. It's best to develop a stategy from the beginning with a reasonable time-line for scanning in your old hard copy reserves. Alternately, you can adopt a "scan forward" policy where everything, after a certain cut-off date, is scanned into electronic format or created electronically. This remedies the transitional pains as you reduce your dependency on paper over a predetermined schedule.

Electronic documents, like hard copies, also have to have some place to go. But rather than in a storage room, they are stored electronically on a computer hard drive, usually in the standard PDF format.

Reducing your dependency on your fax machine, or getting rid of it entirely, is another inroad to the paperless office. There are many economical services that enable you to send and receive faxes directly from and to your computer.

In the end "The Paperless Office" is an ideal, not a reality. But there are many ways to reduce the amount of paper you use to a reasonable minimum. This makes sense on many different levels: it saves you money in the end, it increases productivity, and is good for the environment.