How a Paperless Office Can Help Your Business

Going paperless is a great way to help the environment while increasing the efficiency of your office. But getting there can be tough.

Follow these steps to seamlessly take your office from packed full of paperwork to clean, tidy, and digital.

Step 1: Gather Your Files

To go paperless you first need to know exactly what your project will look like. How many files do you have? How long is it going to take to scan and shred your paper files? Gather your paper records together to get a better estimate of what you can expect.

Step 2: Find a DMS Solution

Once you switch to a primarily digital office you will need a way to manage your digital files. A huge variety of electronic document management systems exist to help companies large and small organize their files and easily grow. Find the one that works for you.

Step 3: Train Your Employees

As with any new office procedure you need to train and prepare your employees. Create clear procedures for scanning paperwork, shredding paperwork, and to explain how employees should handle paperwork and digital files moving forward.

Step 3: Scan Your Files

If you have a small enough amount of paperwork and are willing to put an internal employee on scanning duty, use an in house scanner and start scanning your files. Keep this process organized, clearly indexing digital copies and separating the scanned physical files from the unscanned ones.

If you have thousands of files to scan, its best to partner with a scanning service provider. They are experts in scanning projects and will easily avoid the common pitfalls your employees might run into.

Step 4: Ditch the Paper

1. Slowly ditch your physical files as you scan them. For this you can purchase an in house shredder or partner with a shredding service provider. Shredding services offer one time services as well as ongoing services if you want them to stop by weekly or monthly.
2. Scan all of your files before shredding anything. This will ensure you don’t accidently shred anything before you scan it. You can shred your own materials or hire a shredding professional. You can also find a local Shred Event and drop off your files if you just have a few boxes.
3. If you don’t want to shred your paper files, store your paperwork offsite. Costs of offsite storage are cheap compared to the cost of in house storage.

The trend is towards digital and customers are increasingly looking to do business with green companies. If you follow these steps it will make the process of going digital a breeze.

Use these resources to help you work out the details of your paperless project:

Shred Event in Fredericksburg, VA on Sept. 23rd 2017
https://www.shrednations.com/richmond/richmond-shred-events/?shredeventid=27

Shredding Calculator (estimates your volume of files)
https://www.shrednations.com/shredding-helper/

Virginia Scanning Services
https://www.recordnations.com/scanning/document-scanning-services/

Integrating an Electronic Document Management System
https://www.recordnations.com/articles/implement-electronic-dms-existing-systems/