Whether you are self-employed or part of a regular ol’ company, paper has been the norm, and it has certainly impacted your business processes. Paper creates the need for filing cabinets and folders, all of which take up office space, need managed, and are not easily searchable.
At work and at home, we save important documents–documents that we can’t find, share, or easily organize. We keep papers for years only to eventually shred them when we realize we didn’t need to keep them in the first place. And what about personal disasters (like fires, floods, or even kids who decide to reorganize)? The good news is these problems are now easier to avoid than ever.
Technology has enabled our important information to be filed, searched, organized, archived, deleted, and shared with no extra steps, giving us peace of mind that it is secure, retrievable, and even encrypted for the more paranoid folks.
Converting to paperless
The first step to going paperless is to stop the bleeding and halt the production of new paper, and we’ll talk more later about how getting the right systems in place can do just that. I’ve personally had the opportunity to wage war on paper clutter before it became a problem for our company. But, what if you already have the problem? I have tackled this problem at home, and converting your most important paper documents to digital is the best way to start.
I’m a recovering packrat; I have been for many years. I kept many paper collections: birthday cards, reports, bills, invoices, college work, etc. These were stored in large green containers stacked in our garage, closets, and various storage areas that were moved from one place to the next. I kept way too much for way too long. If I had to justify myself, I kept them because I like data, and in most cases our data happened to be recorded on paper. I think I found it comforting that I could quantify our living costs with utility bills over years, or reference some subject from college by keeping my notes and work. My wife graciously pointed out that I was hoarding giant physical containers to answer questions I’d likely never be asked (and if I were asked, I might never actually be able to find the answer). She was right, and we went on a personal mission to go paperless.
The first way we did this was investing in a Fujitsu Scansnap scanner. (For business, try this model.) I’ve found these to be the best personal and small business scanners that you can buy. We set out on a quest that admittedly took many hours, but we ended up converting (and discarding) most of these items and got rid of all of our paper filled containers. The outcome yielded a lot of trash and digital versions of our most important documents. This did cost us some extra money, because in addition to the scanner, we needed a place to store our new mountain of PDFs. We added a shared network hard drive to our home network and backed up to the cloud. Later, much of this moved to either Google Drive or Evernote — but much more trust is required in online platforms than a personally-managed local storage option, if you are very concerned about security.
Staying paperless
Every piece of paper generated by home or business (hopefully) has a purpose. Credit card statements, business cards, insurance paperwork, timesheets, meeting minutes are necessary and just happen to have started in paper form. The hardest job now for home and office is answering the question, what is the new software tool that replaces them?
Whether you are organizing your home office or rethinking your business methods, you have to choose where all these documents and digital things will be kept. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are the next generation rolodex. Tools like Evernote create personal and business notebooks for jotting down important notes that are shareable and available on all platforms. For our company, we use Google Apps for Business and Google Drive for creating documents, spreadsheets, slides, and PDFs, and would be a great tool for people working at home Files and folders are available on every device for anyone you share with and you do not have to depend on heavyweight internal servers, bulky printers or paper-laden processes when collaborating, sharing, or organizing.
In addition to the core Google Apps, we have picked away at paper processes in almost every other facet thanks to the Google Apps Marketplace. The Marketplace is to businesses what the app store is to your phone. But instead of downloading the latest trendy chat application, company’s can install systems that role out to the entire company and solve problems like expense tracking, time tracking, personal productivity and more.
The beauty of these technologies is enabling digital, scalable systems that replace old paper processes. Every business has the opportunity to capitalize on these to reduce their dependency on paper, and most have personal versions for the freelancer.
Paper is going away; it’s an undeniable trend.There are literally thousands of tools out there that can aid in automating many of your processes. The biggest challenge is identifying what is producing the most paper for you and stopping it. Get in the habit of seeking out tools that can replace your paper documentation and your work will be more efficient, organized and accessible.
About the Author
Matt Paonessa is the owner of a software & tech consultation start up in Hollidaysburg, PA. His company, JMG Systems, partners with commercial and non-profit clients to solve problems and reach their goals by applying technology and marketing strategies.