I am constantly reminded that I am not the only one who has too much paper. Talking to a customer today I realized that just as I get frustrated with too much paper and too many files, so do they.
So how can we get rid of the paper.
1) Get rid of anything that you can get electronically. Personally these consist of brokerage statements, bank statements, credit card statements, etc.. Professionally these consist of pay stubs, eMails, green bar reports, etc.
2) What you have to keep look for an imaging solution.
3) Start imaging everything
4) Start imaging old paper
For the home you can go as simple as using the scanning software with your printer or as sophisticated as products such as neat receipts and other software.
For the office first you will probably need a higher capacity scanner than your printer. As for the software, some software allows you to grab printouts before they go to paper and index them. The key to the profesisonal software is indexing. You want to be able to search contextually (using keywords). You also want to be able to comment on the the images if necessary and redact i.e. whiteout key parts of the images you don’t want other to see.
Besides getting things moved to electronic copies, imaging also has the ability to set up workflow between co-workers. (Imagine anything that needs to be routed around for approval.)
We deal a lot with customer on imaging and what all it is used for is quite amazing. Many hire temporary help to scan and image old paper online. Others use conversion services to move from microfilm to electronic images.
So next time you get paper, paper everywhere think about making it electronic.
