Paperless Office Alternative To Notepad

I have not come up with a good alternative to using a legal pad when in a meeting.

Afterwards, I will scan the notes into my paperless office system. My OCR software, FineReader, does not recognize characters out of my handwriting. I will create a non-searchable PDF file. When I do that, sometimes I include some keywords in the PDF file's property screen. That way, even though the text is not searchable, the keywords are.

What are the alternatives? Type the information into a notebook computer during the meeting. Sorry, I don't type fast enough.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Paperless Office: Faxes

A contact told me yesterday that the way he handles incoming faxes for his paperless office is to:

1. Receive the fax (paper) from a traditional fax machine.
2. Scan it to a PDF file.

I suggested that he instead:

1. Receive the fax via Winfax on his computer or use an online fax service.
2. Print the fax to a PDF file.

The second approach reduces time because scanning can be time consuming. This also increases the quality of the PDF image because each time a document is scanned at 300 dpi the quality of the image is somewhat reduced.

Laserfiche For A Paperless Office

I just got off the phone with a customer of ours that purchased "How To Setup A Paperless Office" ($89). He has a 4 person CPA firm.

He got a $33,000 quote to have Laserfiche setup their paperless office. After it was apparent that $33,000 was too high, they removed some features and dropped the price to $10,000.

Laserfiche does some powerful stuff. They might be able to hide social security numbers on documents. For a 4 person firm, $10,000 might be too powerful!

I think they also use TIFF files instead of PDF files. Laserfiche's argument is that TIFF files are not proprietary. There are enough software programs that can read and create PDF files that I don't have a problem with using PDF files.

Paperless Office Reduced Our Rent

A month ago we moved from a 1,500 sq. ft. office to a 1,100 sq. ft. office. This move resulted in about $500 per month savings. One of the primary reasons why we could move to a smaller space was going paperless.

The differences in our document management system from the time we moved to the larger space to the time when we moved to the smaller office were as follows:

Since 1997 our copies of sales invoices were stored in a computer file. When we needed to furnish a copy of an invoice, it would be recreated using report writer software.

All but about 100 pages of our CPA firm's client files are stored as PDF files.

Old tax records for Denver Tax Software are stored as PDF files, with the exceptions of a small amount of odd shaped vendor invoices.

All bookkeeping records for Denver Tax Software and the CPA firm since 2002 have been paperless.

Most of the tax return files for Denver Tax Software, before going paperless, were scanned before the move.

I still believe that the primary reason to go paperless is to make documents easier to share and search. However, lower rent sure is nice!

GoFileRoom ??

GoFileRoom <http://www.immediatech.com/> is an interesting twist on running a paperless office. GoFileRoom an outsourced paperless office solution. With GoFileRoom a business stores its documents on a server on the Web.

There are some strong advantages to considering a paperless office like GoFileRoom. GoFileRoom professionals manage updates, backups and other IT functions. You can easily access your GoFileRoom paperless office from any place that has an Internet connection.

There are some serious downsides. We sometimes lose our DSL connection. Losing our DSL using GoFileRoom would mean that our paperless office documents are not available until DSL comes back online. What if GoFileRoom gets too expensive? How difficult is it to move the paperless office on GoFileRoom from GoFileRoom to one of your computers? Does GoFileRoom keep the files in an industry standard PDF format or is some format that only works with GoFileRoom?

GoFileRoom was recently purchased by the Thompson Group.

Setting Up Paperless Files For Clients

It is easy and makes good sense to model the paperless office after a good traditional office. For an accounting firm, that would mean a permanent file folder for each client and a file folder for each year. This system is workable, but I now think there is a better way.

Why? 1. You want to be able to burn a CD with client information for the client. 2. Desktop and network search programs are now reasonably priced and powerful.

If you set up a client file system the way I described, above, it would be time - consuming to create client information CDs. Some of the files, the client should not have access to. These files might contain research, correspondence, workpapers, etc. The files that the client should have, and would want, would contain tax returns, certain financial reports and copies of tax documents.

Solution: 1. Have two permanent files, one for the office only, and the other available for the client. 2. Have a folder for Tax Return Documents. 3. Have a folder for Tax Returns.