The Paperless Office (Living in a Star Trek World)

Back in 2004, I began my quest for a paperless office. In those days, I had no idea of what my paperless office would look like. Accountants are loaded with paper and I wanted to look like Star Trek - zero paper. Don-t get me wrong, we still use paper. We just no longer store anything in paper form. Everything is stored in Portable Document Format (pdf). The only paper allowed in the office is for the current year. All other paper documents are either returned to our clients or scanned and destroyed. Below is a summary of our experience in converting to a paperless office.

Benefits:

We have reduced our filing cabinets by at least 80%. We still have file cabinets but now they hold computer supplies and our holiday decorations. Five years ago, I had 150 banker boxes that held our archived files. We are currently down to 30 and see light at the end of the tunnel.

Our office is cleaner and neater, and it is much easier to find documents. Because we can access all of our documents remotely, we are able to use off-site personnel and it gave us the opportunity to develop our Virtual Accounting Office. A paperless solution is better for the environment and we have far fewer paper cuts, the major danger in an accounting office.

Requirements:

My first recommendation is to purchase a Document Management System (DMS). The one we purchased, efilecabinet, was relatively inexpensive at under $2,000. Our DMS has a predefined filing system which laid the groundwork for our electronic filing system. Our standardized filing now has naming conventions that are identical for all documents and include Client Name, Description and Date, in that order.

The second big recommendation is to purchase high quality, fast scanners. We purchased a scanner for every desk at about $1,000 apiece. I chose to give every person a scanner because (1) we are a small office so the cost was not prohibitive, (2) people will scan if it is easy and (3) I didn't want assign scanning to one person because it can become an extremely tedious task. An alternative to individual scanners is a scanning station where employees can use one of several available scanners.

I hired my now 88 year old father to scan in archived documents for us but high school or college students would work just as well. Well, almost as well. Thanks Dad.

As we moved to a paperless office, we found that we were spending a tremendous amount of time shredding. So we hired a shredding company to pick up and shred our confidential documents.

Caveats:

You will probably experience initial pushback from your staff. Going paperless is something new to learn and it won't work exactly right when you start. And when the DMS software goes down, we have to manually scan. This isn't difficult but now you have another piece of technology that can cause problems for your office.

Moving to a paperless office actually changed our behavior. We learned to not use staples and to make sure that our documents are scanner friendly. We switched from pencil to pen because pencil doesn't scan well and highlighters can pose a problem. We also learned that you need to count the pages of your document to ensure that all pages have been scanned.

I encourage you to look into a paperless office. You probably have already moved in that direction without realizing it. Take the leap and think paperless. You will find that your life is simpler, cleaner, neater, better organized and more pleasant. And you are saving a tree.

I used to say that when I die, I want to be buried in paperwork. But that doesn't look like it will happen. That idea seems positively quaint.