Paperless office: can you really digitize every­thing?

Well organized and readily available contracts, orders, and invoices are some of the hallmarks of a struc­tured workplace, although the average office tends to be anything but! Even if employees spend a good chunk of their working day struc­tur­ing, ordering, and pri­or­i­tiz­ing their important documents, those mountains of paper will only grow taller with time. Even­tu­al­ly, these files end up stacked so high that the hunt for an old document can feel like an eternity. Digital archiving offers a smart al­ter­na­tive to this bu­reau­crat­ic nightmare of endless red tape and ad­min­is­tra­tive tumult. With a paperless office, these bu­reau­crat­ic tasks are reduced, sig­nif­i­cant­ly improving the workflow.

If you’re wondering if a paperless office is worth the trouble, ask yourself this: how much time do you and your col­leagues lose to hunting for specific documents? And how much does this end up dis­tract­ing you from your real work? Depending on the size of your archives, you could end up spending hours of your week searching through piles of paper. This is all time that could be saved with digital archiving strate­gies. Re­struc­tur­ing an office’s filing system is no easy task, however. Getting rid of all the paper in an office is not something that can be done overnight. There are various ad­di­tion­al costs that come from pur­chas­ing paperless office software. If you’re planning to make the switch, you should ensure that you have the following resources:

• Storage and server capacity: whatever kind of storage media you choose, first ensure that you have suf­fi­cient storage space for all your documents: both current ones and those that are yet to come. These should all be saved on the database of a local server, which should also offer enough space for all the documents. It’s also necessary to plan and execute a suitable backup strategy. Cloud solutions, such as Dropbox and Evernote, provide two al­ter­na­tives to external storage. These are re­spon­si­ble for hosting, but also pre­vent­ing the documents from ending up in the wrong hands.

• Scanner: digitally archiving every important document is the main function of a paperless office. That’s why it’s crucial that your scanner has a suf­fi­cient spectrum of functions. When selecting your scanning device, consider the benefits of a high-speed device that can produce high-quality images. It’s also worth ensuring that your scanner can handle various formats and paper thickness, if necessary.

• Document man­age­ment system (DMS): it’s rec­om­mend­ed that you use paperless office software to manage the tran­si­tion to digital archiving. These allow the scanned documents to be filed and organized as quickly as possible. There are many different kinds of document man­age­ment systems, such as open source Alfresco or the programs ELOoffice, and BSCW.   iDocument enables you to create a paperless office on Mac computers.

• Elec­tron­ic signature: for official documents, such as contracts, hand­writ­ten sig­na­tures are no longer suf­fi­cient; they lose their validity upon being scanned. Therefore, it’s important to ensure you have the fa­cil­i­ties to create elec­tron­ic sig­na­tures. Digital trans­ac­tion companies such as DocuSign provide a wide range of devices that enable you to verify your identity and apply your elec­tron­ic signature to any document.

Having a paperless office ac­cel­er­ates your work process, since all your documents can be accessed easily and with little effort. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, the office both gains space pre­vi­ous­ly des­ig­nat­ed to storing files and saves money spent on postage. Digitally archiving your documents is also an en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly friendly al­ter­na­tive to printing endless sheets of paper, which will reflect pos­i­tive­ly on your company as a whole.

However, it’s also crucial to consider potential problems that come hand-in-hand with a paperless office. While having your documents saved on a central storage device or in a Cloud allows easy access to your files, op­por­tunis­tic hackers may take advantage of this fact. This is why it’s important to ensure that adequate security measures have been taken to protect your files, either by you or your hosting provider. Fur­ther­more, the DMS used should include a com­pre­hen­sive access rights man­age­ment system, which only allows permitted users access to the documents. You should also make sure that all legal documents are available in their unchanged form in ac­cor­dance with their ap­plic­a­ble retention periods.

If you follow these steps and put in the initial effort, you’ll soon be enjoying the benefits of a paperless office, not to mention all the newly free space where stacks of paper used to pile up.