Practical tips for a paperless office

Is a paperless office for a soloists a practical reality? In my article Small business record keeping: Dealing with the shoebox Marc Fraser from Melbourne raised the possibility of maintaining financial source documents electronically.

Fraser’s discussion motivated me to research and implement my own paperless office.

Firstly, a bit of good news - it is legal. However, ATO Ruling TR 2005/9 stipulates that if you are maintaining your financial records electronically, the documents must be a true and clear reproduction of the original paper records, stored for five years, and retrievable at all times.

So I decided to make my office paperless.

Previously I was receiving and storing a lot of electronic information in my email program. However, nowadays I tend not to rely on its capacity to store information as I am now concerned with the file size, and the ease of archiving and retrieving. Instead I have created a sub-folder in my documents area on my PC and when financially relevant material arrives via email, I open the attachment, rename it and save it there.

Next step on my journey to a paperless office was a scanner. In the course of research, I found cheap models took up to five minutes to scan a single page and slowed down my PC. This may suit some soloists, but I needed more speed.

I quickly discovered something very exciting about some scanners, a feature known as O.C.R., Optical Character Recognition. This enables you to produce a searchable PDF, which allows you to search within the text of what you scan.

With searchable PDFs in place I now needed a search engine on my computer. Google Desktop is a free downloadable piece of software which can search your desktop, just as Google does the internet. I can click on Google Desktop, type in insurance in the search field, and moments later see relevant results from documents, email, Word, Excel or a searchable PDF.

Here are some more tips for a paperless office:

Send electronic invoices and encourage your suppliers to send you electronic invoices.
Investigate whether your suppliers and your financial institutions will allow you to download online statements, and ask them to stop mailing you.
Stay up to date by reading news online and subscribing to enewsletters.
Download cutepdf freeware that will allow you to print to pdf and store the document electronically.
For about $15 annually you can buy a Digital Signature which will ensure your emails are secure and encrypted.
Sign up to an electronic fax services like Utbox which allows you to both receive and send faxes via email.

If your business is quite complicated you may want to consider a document management system like Info Organiser which uses a database to catalogue all your records, and wait for it, you can link your source document directly to the transaction within your business management software, and retrieve it at the click of a button.

Remember, it is vitally important that you store the documents securely and in a searchable and retrievable format. I can not stress enough the importance of good back-up procedures for your paperless office. Sitting with clients who have paid to have expensive back-up systems installed, and going through the process of retrieving the data to find it is unreadable, or simply not there is never enjoyable.

Finally, in recent times I have received emails discouraging me from unnecessarily printing them:

Please consider the environment before printing this;

or

I know my messages are enthralling but please don’t print them.

Do you have an enviromentally inspirational quote within your email signature you would like to share with other solists?

Heather Smith, an MYOB Certified Consultant and Specialist Trainer, provides business management software solutions which generate accurate and timely financial information that the business owner can use and understand.

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Great followup article Heather. I have not made major inroads into getting financial records etc. totally paperless, however as a solo Industrial Designer, I have stepped closer towards a PO by installing a digital sketching tablet. Not only has it upped the quality and speed of my design presentation work, it has dramatically reduced the amount of tracing film, pens, pencils, markers and so on that I needed in the past. You can use the tablet to mark-up drawings and images quickly, and get them back out to clients and suppliers in a fraction of the time of the old-school "print > mark-up > scan > touch-up > email" technique.
Some additional tips worth considering:
1. Recommend (strongly) that clients to pay their accounts electronically, as an alternative to cheques. Whilst the amount of paper is not significant (cheques are only small physically), the energy, carbon-emissions and time taken to bank the cheque isn't really a sustainable in the long-run. Better yet, EFT's generally clear quicker than cheques too!
2. Invest in a larger PC monitor... this way you can do more reading / reviewing of documents on-screen (beef up the zoom for your own comfort) and avoid having to print. I'm using a 21", but I've seen some great 30" screens which are becoming more affordable everyday.
3. Ditch the Post-its and use an electronic to-do list. There are a bunch of these out there, and chances are you already have one installed on your system.
4. Use an electronic password program to store all your important usernames, passwords and access codes. One I find useful is KeePass (free too!), but there are a bunch of them out there. No more searching around for that elusive "password post-it"

There are dozens of ways of cutting out paper usage in the home and office. Be innovative. Even though recycling systems take care of your used paper, it is better to reduce your consumption in the first place.
Hope this helps. Love to hear your comments!
Marc Marc Fraser from Melbourne
Marc, Thank-you so much for taking the time to comment ~ we should have written the article together!! Do people still use cheques? Yes I agree a large PC monitor that allows you to see 2 A4 pages at the same time is good, I actually have 2 that are linked, and I just drag and drop on to the other monitor while I work on the main monitor ~ probably not environmentally friendly on the electricity usage though, but really easy to set up. I did read about the digital tablets but as I have never seen one in operation, felt a fraud commenting on them – thank-you for your insight. I do have kee-pass but have not worked out how to use it – you have inspired me to give it another go. I am also considering buying a new flash worm farm, and writing it off as a tax deduction under the heading of “office equipment ~ shredder”. My worms love munching on shredded confidential paper, however my chickens love munching on the Styrofoam box that my worms are in. Heather Smith from Brisbane | Read my articles
As the tax office requires documents to be kept for 5-7 years this makes it difficult to make paperless. In that time period software has been updated yearly and makes it difficult to open old files, in particular older financial accounting files such as MYOB or similar if changed from other software. And when using a new computer software of seven years ago is not considered worth reinstalling or trying to work with updated or different platforms. Although I already implement the PDF work flowand copy all my work to removable drives and recycle everything I can, I still have to keep hard copies of many documents out of necessity. PDF is definitely a way of keeping many documents on file and older versions can be opened in updated versions however fonts need to be saved within the PDF as font structures have also changed over the years and makes some PDFs unreadable if the font is not embedded, available or not on the person's system. I find the new USB / ethernet removable drives very handy for storage as well. Karen from Springwood
I remember a quip I read somewhere that the paperless office was about as likely as the paperless toilet...
At any rate, you might want to consider PDFCreater as an open source alternative to CutePDF if that is important to you.
http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator/
Why do you need to pay money for a digital signature for email? I would look into gpg and pgp... Evan from Melbourne, Australia
If the ATO requires a true and clear reproduction of the originals, then it means a photographic-style image? Is it possible to search for text in an image that is a photographic-style rather than the actual textual content only? Grant Hyman - salescentral from Sydney
Hi Heather... sounds like you've got a nice monitor setup there (envy building). I reckon everyone is making valid points. There is no "silver bullet" approach to sustainable record keeping and minimising paper usage. Environmental awareness is at an all time high, and anything we can do to reduce paper / water / packaging / plastic bag consumption - or what you might call "urban toxins" (Copyright MF 2008!!!) has got to be a good thing. Searchability of archive data is a significant issue - so it pays to devise a simple file naming system and folder structure for your scanned documents - something that can help you pin-point dates, companies, reference numbers or whatever is relevant to your needs. Ideally, this system will not need to change much as time (and software / OS's) rolls by. K.I.S.S principle applies. Using fairly generic file formats (PDF / JPEG) should be a safe bet long term; admittedly these may not be ideal for content searching without OCR for instance. I'm no expert, happy to admit. But I know that reliable / consistent data-management in my biz is mission-critical - so if the threat of a tax audit puts shivers up your spine, it probably pays to consider your electronic-record keeping & DM processes carefully and set up your data archives for easy and fuss-free navigation. Give me a yell if you need help with future articles... happy to chuck in my 20cents where I feel "qualified" to contribute! Marc Fraser from Melbourne

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