Are you still suffering the inefficiencies of a paper-based office workflow?

Maybe your file cabinets are threatening to take over your entire building – or you’re missing a filing system entirely, with important documents piled on your desk or haphazardly organized in drawers.

Perhaps you or your staff are wasting too much time chasing down important documents, figuring out how to share them among multiple locations, and filing them away for easy retrieval later on.

You might even be open to risks that had never occurred to you: Floods, fires or other disasters can carry your records away. While you might have insurance on your office building, you can’t insure the information in those files. Maybe you have lifetime record retention requirements on some of your documents, leaving you open to paper deteriorating and fading over time. Or you might have compliance risks – auditors regularly dropping by to check on your documents, etc.

Making the move to a practically paperless office – or a less-paper office – might seem way too daunting. The perceived cost and effort alone is enough to make many owners and office managers turn their head to change and continue the age-old paper shuffle.

But once you see how reducing the paper in your system can improve your workflow, solve your storage problems and increase your compliance with recordkeeping requirements – as well as how affordable it can be when it’s scaled to your business’ size and scope – you may find that paperless document management can work really well for you.

This is a huge first step.

Once you’re over this initial hurdle, it’s time to start thinking about how you’ll actually transition to a less-paper office. The first step should really be about identifying those pieces and/or sources of paper that are most burdensome to your bottom line. Are there certain documents you retain or produce that you frequently need to pull? Certain records that absolutely, positively, must be ironclad against disaster? Or is all your paper simply crowding you out of your office or racking up huge bills for off-site storage?

This will help you with phase one: deciding the extent to which you’ll reduce paper.

• Is your goal to eliminate all paper? Or do you simply want to cut down on the amount that’s generated, circulated, and stored?
• Are you planning to scan all of your existing documents into an online storage service? Or is it enough for you to just scan future forms, applications, invoices, etc. and hang on to existing paper?
• Do you want to take it one step further and cut down on the amount of paper printed? If so, you can set up a system that will take emailed or computer-generated documents and store them in the same system as your scanned documents, just as if you’d printed them and filed them away in a physical storage system.

Now that you understand the scope of your problem and your end goal, you can move on to step two in the process: Developing a plan.