Where would I start with researching a small business going 'paperless'

Brighton_belle

As the title says..
I have been given the task at work to research going paperless so we can get rid of a basement full of client files and downsize the space we take up as a business.

There are two seaparate issues:

1) downsizing our archive of client papers (We are finding out spearately what our industry (FSA regulated) requires us to keep.

2) moving forward, how do we transfer the way we work day to day from the near future to keeping paperless records in a way we can all access online, that covers faxes,emails and letters, applications etc.

Are there systems we can investigate? Are there companies that we can pay to teach us/set this up?

Any advice appreciated. This is a sharp learning curve.

marlot

You need to research document management solutions, or scanning services. Lots of vendors around.

closed

Depends how you work today, don't you use a database of some sort?

Archiving old paper will involve a lot of scanning, and then organising every single scan into a meaningful directory/naming structure. Very time consuming, with potentially little benefit - how much will the business save on storage space and how much are they prepared to pay to go electronic?

print to pdf instead of print to paper.

use electronic faxes or insist clients use email instead.

Get a robust backup strategy in place first, one disk crash or virus could wipe out the business if it's all electronic.

Brighton_belle

closed wrote: »

Depends how you work today, don't you use a database of some sort?
well we use a mixture of word/excel and print off emails to store on the file. Is that what you mean by a database? (apologies if I appear really dense... I am:o, really trying to learn fast here in an area that has not needed to concern me before)

Archiving old paper will involve a lot of scanning, and then organising every single scan into a meaningful directory/naming structure. Very time consuming, with potentially little benefit - how much will the business save on storage space and how much are they prepared to pay to go electronic?
We think we would hire in a service to do this, depending on cost. Savings would be in region of £7,200 p.a. This is a significant amount for the business. Costing around £7k to do would be 'ok'.

print to pdf instead of print to paper.

use electronic faxes or insist clients use email instead. Yup, certainly being proactive now in switching to email with clients.

Get a robust backup strategy in place first, one disk crash or virus could wipe out the business if it's all electronic.
Yes, we already have a very good backup in place thanks.

Thanks for taking the time to reply - it is all building up layers of my understanding.

closed

If you only use word and excel, do you actually need to print anything to paper? If other things don't come in electronically, these can be scanned manually.

You could store emails in personal folders, pst's in outlook (your backup method will need to be able to backup these, possibly open files), or install a pdf writer, eg cutepdf, and print to pdf and store in a folder/directory for each client.

There are various services which can convert fax to email.

Costs obviously depend on how many sheets of paper you need scanning, if you don't have the staff to do it in house.

Have the backups ever been tested, what are you using, are they stored onsite? Your hard disk and backup storage media/method may need siginificantly more capacity to go electronic.

To assess feasibility, you probably need to look at what exactly is in each file, how they arrive there, and the need for storage, if the contents are largely coming out of your printers, then other than possible regulatory reasons, there's no particular need to print things out.

Owain_Moneysaver

It may be simpler and cheaper to use off-site document archiving if most of your archives are 'dead' files. You bar-code the files/boxes and the archive firm takes them away and keeps them safe. If you want the file you email them the reference number and they send it over by courier next day.

And they don't keep the files in basements which could flood :-)

You can cut your paper output to one-quarter on long documents by printing 4 A4 pages resized to 2xA5 per A4 page double-sided for file copies.

robmar0se

Seems to me that you have two very different objectives. (i) how to convert what you already have, and (ii) how you will proceed going forward.

You could do well to research "document management services" such as:
(i) http://www.ipcgroup.co.uk/document-scanning-storage-uk.html or,
(ii) http://www.datacapture.co.uk/scanning-solutions/scanning-services/document-scanning.htm or
(iii) http://www.papercapture.co.uk/services.html

Going forward maybe a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system might suit? eg http://www.sage.co.uk/sage-crm.

Maybe these aren't right, or over the top, but just by researching and talking to some of these people will help you evolve a strategy that better suits your needs?