One of my goals in 2011 was to put a priority on converting to a paperless office. Beyond saving a few trees, some of the advantages of the paperless office are less clutter, better organization, and moving to one system of record tracking instead of two (paper and digital). The downsides are time taken for initial conversion and the risk of losing data. Loss of data can be addressed by redundant backups, and the conversion time can be stretched out over time.
Below are some of the key areas I’m focused on for my paperless office:
Eliminate Your Fax Machine
Unless you are a lawyer or realtor, chances are you can completely eliminate your fax machine from your business. Most customers today are happy with a scanned document or have digital solutions. About three years ago I got rid of mine and now use MaxEmail (http://www.maxemail.com/) which gives me a dedicated incoming fax phone number, converts all incoming faxes to PDFs and emails them to me. I’m debating eliminating this altogether given I very, very rarely receive faxes whereas at one time there were the staple of my business. Today most of my faxes have been replaced by PDF email attachments, scans, or emails.
Digital Bank Records
I used Wells Fargo and in December I sat down with a banker there to discuss online banking (which I had avoided up till now). I’m looking at canceling my paper bank statements trusting Wells Fargo for their seven years of bank records. The risk of losing your bank records will rest on your bank and you may want to consider making local backups of your online bank records.
Online Bill Pay
I’m going to try using Wells Fargo to pay all my bills. This will eliminate the new to write actual checks. I’ll also look at automating the payment process to avoid receiving hard copy bills via mail from vendors.
Eliminate Snail Mail
There are several online services out there now who will convert all your incoming mail to digital format and email it to you. One such service is called Earth Class Mail (http://www.earthclassmail.com/) will give you a physical address where you can send all your mail. They will take your physical mail, scan it, and email pages to you. You then get the option of having the company destroy the mail, convert it to PDF for you, etc. This option will mean you will never open an envelope again. However, it doesn’t really eliminate incoming paper, to do that you’ll need to contact those who send you mail and request they use email instead of postal mail.
Client Invoicing
I’ll be sending all my invoices via email to clients in 2011. I’ve upgraded my accounting software to help in this process. I’ll still send hard copies to those who don’t want digital invoices, but I’m hoping, with a little persuasion to convert most clients over to this method of invoicing. If you are using accounting software on your computer, chances are you can create PDF invoices to email to clients. Many businesses are now doing their accounting in the ‘cloud’ using systems like Freshbooks (http://www.freshbooks.com/). Fees for online systems vary. You’ll want to do some research to calculate if its cheaper to buy dedicated software to work offline and email invoices, or pay a monthly fee to do your accounting with cloud services online.
Client Payments
I’m going to try to convert most clients over to making digital payments by credit card (rack up those frequent flier miles!) or direct deposit. I think this will make things easier for everyone involved.
Converting Records to Digital Archives
Perhaps one of the most time intensive tasks will be converting existing paper documents to digital. To ease this task I purchased an all-in-one laser printer, copier, scanner and fax machine that has a document feeder. This new printer will allow me to take multi-page documents and load them into the feeder and convert them automatically to a single, multi-page PDF document for archiving. This feature is really snazzy and I’ll end up using it more than most of the other functions of the unit. The same unit is also used when a client requests paper documents. As a bonus, it has a smaller footprint than the separate units I’ve been using in the past for each of these functions.
Note: sometimes its helpful to convert scans to actual text which can be edited. Most scanners today include some sort of OCR (optical character recognition) while will automate this process.
Backing Up Data
One of the last things to address is having a solid plan for backing up your files. I highly suggest using some system which automates this process. 95% of us are really bad about backing up our files. This last year I purchased an Apple Digital Time Capsule (http://www.apple.com/timecapsule/) which automates my backups. Basically anytime I’m online at my home office, my router will backup my computers. Its automated to backup my files on an hourly basis and keep backups for several months. Its an elegant no-brainer solution. There are similar solutions now that do similar things in the cloud. One popular solution is DropBox (http://www.dropbox.com/) which gives your online storage and for a fee, will automate backing up your computer files.
Conclusion
I believe there are many advantages to converting to a paperless office and very few downsides. I do believe it is good to review your options at least on a yearly basis as technology changes and with those changes there are usually less expensive or more economical solutions out there.