Scanning Old Files

One of the road blocks to starting a paperless office is the thought of scanning all of your old files and documents. That could represent years of old back files. Remember, a paperless office is another name for a content management system or document management system.

While starting your paperless office by scanning your old files is an option, it might not be your best option. There is usually nothing that forces you to have an exclusively paperless office. For example, you could keep the traditional paper files through 2004 and go paperless starting in 2005. You could also have a "phased" paperless office.

A phased paperless office might convert one function at a time to paperless. For example, sales orders might be the first set of documents to "go paperless". After that, you might convert Accounts Receivables to paperless.

Most of the old paper documents will be destroyed when the document retention period has run. Let's say that after 10 years, old documents are destroyed. Why would you want to spend hours or days scanning 9 year old documents that will be destroyed in 1 year?

There are some "permanent file" documents that will not be scheduled for destruction. Those old documents should be scanned into your paperless office.

If document storage is becoming too expensive to deal with, you might be able to find a service that will scan documents for a reasonable fee. Labeling documents by filename can be very time consuming. As long as the documents are searchable it doesn't make too much difference what filename you use.