The paperless office has been a myth up until just recently but does going paperless mean having no paper at all in your office? Of course, that depends on your office and the type of documents you have. Legal, accounting or medical offices would probably have a harder time going paperless due to the types of records in these offices.
There are lots of questions to ask and your answers to these questions would determine if your office should go paperless. So would you say that a paperless office might mean less paper instead of no paper? It may be very hard to go to a ‘no paper’ environment for any office, and there are pros and cons.
Cost Effective: If your office and workflow does not have to have a printed copy for every document, your printer ink and paper budget will decrease. Think about how you process your mail and if you could possibly distribute via email instead, which will also cut down on your postage. Simply rethinking about how you print and distribute from your office will be a great savings to you.
Environment: It goes without saying that reduction of paper will help the environment in reducing landfill waste, all that goes into production of paper, greenhouse gas emissions, energy used by printers, and production and disposal of ink cartridges.
Easy access: If you decide that going paperless would mean that you put your digital files in the cloud, Google Drive is a great tool to use. Google is a secure cloud environment, and it is included in your Google or Gmail account so every time you sign into your Gmail account, you also have access to your digital files. Google has also priced the digital file storage to be very economical.
It takes time: As Sherry Borsheim of International Association of Business Organizing (IABO) says, “going paperless is a process.” It is not an overnight process, and it will take time. Depending on the amount of paper files you have in your office will depend on how much time it will take you to transition to a more paperless environment. Time to make a plan for transitioning, and time to implement the changes in your staff workflow.
Changing current processes: The first step of transitioning to a paperless environment will mean that you’ll need to review your current processes and systems. Think about the types of paper files that can be switched to working with digital files instead of printing them out. Is there a way to work with some types of files digitally instead of everyone in the office printing the same document? Do we need to keep receipts for accounting and tax purposes? And what about contracts and other legal documents that need to be kept in the original format?
Cost of digital storage: There is a cost for digital file storage whether you decide to back up all your digital files to Google Drive as mentioned previously or in-house to CDs or Flash Drives or external hard drives, or other cloud services such as Carbonite, or Dropbox. You will need to decide what is best for your office. There are always concerns about cloud service security, but also think about how safe your in-house back up situation may be because you would be responsible for thinking about loss of these devices, system failure or crashes, in addition to weather circumstances such as flood, fire, tornado, etc. In addition, you have to think about digital formats that are no longer supported, such as moving digital files that you had on the old floppy discs to Flash Drives or external hard drives, and upgrade your older files from time to time to make sure they remain usable; or again decide to go to the cloud with your digital filing. Do you have a business continuation and back up plan?
Decide on your target goal. What is your objective in reducing paper in your office? Do you have a records retention policy? What types of documents do you need to keep and how long should you keep records? You and your staff needs to agree on a records retention policy for the types of paper and digital files you retain to use as a guideline for how you want records kept and how long certain files should be kept. We have several articles at records retention guidelines that you might find helpful.
Remember not everything needs to be switched to digital at one time. Some of your old records may not need converting to digital at all, and just simply discard them when they reach a certain age. It may not be efficient for you to scan every document in your office if you won’t need to keep them or retrieve them later. Then start with your current workflow processes, and you’ll most likely see what can be converted during your daily activities. Make a policy for these workflow processes that you can easily identify. Get comfortable with one daily activity at a time, then move on to another.
Decide what files will need to be kept in paper hard copy format and what files can be digital format. Be sure to decide on a naming system for filing both your paper and digital files. If you use Google Drive, decide if you want every digital file in Google Docs format, which makes the contents searchable.
For the paper files that you decide that you need to keep in hard copy format, index them into Paper Tiger Filing System software so that you’ll have a system to keep track of where they are. You can file with ease of mind that you’ll be able to find them later. Paper Tiger allows you to put an item name on every document, but also allows you to input all keywords relating to the documents in each hanging file folder, because as you know some files could have multiple item names that just won’t fit on the file tab. You will be able to search for any keyword that you’re thinking about on any given day for the file that you need.
Paper Tiger Online connects to Google Docs/Drive to activate Digital Tiger. To further explain, Digital Tiger is a free add-on with a paid Paper Tiger Online Basic or Pro account, and is the function that connects your Paper Tiger Online account to your Google Docs/Google Drive account, then you will be able to search from Paper Tiger to find both your paper/physical items that you’ve indexed into Paper Tiger, and your digital files that you’ve created, uploaded or scanned into Google Docs format.
Google Drive is an extension for Google email account holders that allows an account holder to download a Google Drive folder to their personal device(s), such as, your desktop PC, Mac, Laptop, Mobile Phone, iPad, etc., in order to save/store digital files into the folder which are then synchronized into your Google Drive account within Gmail. Google Drive is compatible with the Mac and Windows operating systems. So if you have multiple computers that you have documents saved to, you’ll now be able to synch those digital files to one cloud location and be able to access from any computer where you sign into your Gmail account. Click here to see more information about Google Drive.
See one of our previous articles Not Just Any Filing System to Get Organized! that might help you see how Paper Tiger and Digital Tiger, powered by Google Docs works. Whether you use Paper Tiger together or separately from Google Drive, using these two software tools is a great way to organize your paper and digital files so that you can get organized and find what you need, when you need it!
Tags: Digital Files, digital filing system, document management software, filing system software, get organized, paper filing systems, Paper Tiger "finding" filing system, paperless, scanning
