How Realistic is the Idea of a Paperless Office?

Guest contributor, GoPaperless Solutions, says:

For some, the paperless office is all about conservation and environmental protection. For many reasons conservation and protection are good ideas; therefore, so are paperless offices and paperless document management. For those not-so-tree-huggerish folks out there, for whom the paperless office has had no draw at all, it's definitely time to take a fresh look at this idea.

A paperless office can benefit the bottom line as much as it does lakes and streams. Sometimes a good idea is just, well, a good idea.

Four benefits of a paperless office include:

1. The ease with which documents can be found. Simply include the client name or some other identifier in the name of each document you save, and even if you save the file in the wrong location, you can pull it up with a simple search.
2. Documents in a paperless office are easier to retrieve – you don't have to leave your desk! Furthermore, if you store your documents online with GoPaperless, you can retrieve them from any computer with an Internet connection, on any day of the week, at any time of the day or night.
3. Ability to retrieve a document even if someone else has already retrieved it. Think of how many annoying, office-wide document hunts will be avoided when everyone is taking advantage of this technology.
4. The ease with which documents can be combined, faxed, duplicated or otherwise manipulated. Consider a common, simple office task: making a copy. Likely, making a copy is no longer necessary because now everyone has every document right at their fingertips on their desktop computers, but just for discussion, consider that someone outside the office needs a copy. Just email it to them. There, that was easy.

What happens when a client wants a hard copy?

Before the paperless office, the document had to be retrieved from the paper file system, copied on a copier and returned to the paper file system (where it could be misfiled). With a paperless office, the document is pulled up on the computer and sent to the printer. It doesn't get moved (or misfiled), bent, crinkled or have coffee spilled all over it. The copier, expensive to buy, use and maintain, no longer necessary. Same goes for the paper file system which can fill a large room in some companies – no longer necessary.

Consider another common office task: sending a fax. In a paperless office, faxes are sent directly from the PC over the Internet. This means everyone in the office can send faxes at the same time, more than one person can fax the same document to different recipients at the same time, and all this without an office fax machine! Faxes to a paperless office are likewise received over the Internet and do not require paper or toner. Furthermore, the people who send you faxes and the people who receive your faxes do not know that you are doing anything differently (although, the abnormally high quality of the faxes you send might be a giveaway). The faxes sent over the Internet look better since the document is not being scanned as it rolls through a fax machine. If the document was scanned well originally or created from scratch in Word, it looks outstanding.

Each paperless office has its own story to tell, and when your office is paperless, you will discover advantages unique to your office, work and procedures. Consider one other advantage common to all paperless offices, and that is a public relations one. Green is in right now, but smart and efficient never go out of style. Showing off your paperless office to current or potential clients is a great way to impress. It tells that client or prospect that you are looking for ways to keep your business lean and mean and that you leverage technology to do that. And, of course, the tree huggers might want to treat you like a tree.

Read the original blog as posted by GoPaperless.

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