Going Paperless - How to Start and Establish My Paperless Office

!±8± Going Paperless - How to Start and Establish My Paperless Office

If you have a small business office or home office, chances are you have paper documents stacked (or scattered) on your desk, in folders, binders, inboxes, shoe boxes and probably a large bulky file cabinet or two. With today's computer technology, now is the time to establish and move towards a "Paperless Office". Here's how your small business or home office can get started in "going paperless".

At bare minimum, the "tools" you will need are a computer (or laptop) and a document scanner. Depending on the available storage you have on your computer, you may want to add additional hard-drive space either through an external or internal hard drive.

Next you should define a well-designed folder structure (directory structure on your computer) that will give you a simple and logical organization of where you store your electronic documents. Having all your files in one directory, or in a poorly thought out directory structure will quickly make your paperless office confusing and inefficient.

Second, you need to define a standard file-naming convention. This file-naming standard will be used for every document you scan into your computer. If you do not have a consistent way of naming your files, then as your paperless office grows, you will have a difficult time finding documents and managing your files.

Once you have your tools (computer and document scanner), and you've defined your folder structure and file-naming standards, you are ready to start managing your paperless office. I recommend focusing on current documentation first. Start with current papers cluttering your desk and inbox. Start scanning them into your computer, name your documents according to your file-naming convention and save them in the appropriate folders. Now enjoy shredding and/or recycling that physical paper document.

Once you have cleared your desk and inbox, you can begin the scanning and recycling process with the rest of your hard-copy documents. You will still need a small file cabinet or some physical storage in your office for critical and important "original" hard-copy documents. You probably do not want to shred the title to your cars or your birth certificates. But you will be amazed at how much physical space you can free up and how much clutter you can get rid of when you go paperless in your small and home office.

Going Paperless - How to Start and Establish My Paperless Office

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Paperless Office Best Practices - Define a Naming Convention Standard For Your Paperless Office

!±8± Paperless Office Best Practices - Define a Naming Convention Standard For Your Paperless Office

The Paperless Office concept is real. And with today's technology, it is more affordable and easier to accomplish for even a small home office. To successfully maintain your "paperless office", it is critical for you to establish a simple naming convention for all your electronic documents. When you follow a well-defined naming convention, it is easier to find your documents, and continually use and maintain your paperless office.

A naming convention is simply a well-structured standard that you define for your electronic documents. Keep it simple and logical, so that you and anyone else that accesses your documents can easily understand and follow your naming guidelines.

For example, a simple and logical naming convention for your home bills might be:

[date].[company].[type].pdf

Following this naming convention, your scanned "bill" statements may have the following file names:

2010_01_01.ComEd.bill.pdf 2010_01_15.Verizon.bill.pdf 2009_12_15.Verizon.contract.pdf

Immediately, just from looking at these file names, you can tell that these documents are your electric utility bills and cell phone bills. You also can instantly identify the dates for each bill statement. In the last example, you can quickly see that this is your "contract" agreement with your cell phone service.

This is just one simple example of a naming convention. When defining your own naming standards, consider a structure that will best support the way you think and organize your office.

And do not stress about getting your naming structure perfect in the beginning. The nice thing about a paperless office, having all your documents as electronic (soft-copy) files on your computer, is you can easily change your naming standards and tree folder structure in the future.

I strongly suggest to use "dates" in the first part of your file names, and format them as [YYYY_MM_DD]. Use the full [four-digit year], then the [two-digit month] and then the [two-digit day]. By following this specific format for dates in the front of all your filenames, you then have the flexibility to sort your files by "name", allowing you another way to quickly locate your documents within each folder chronologically.

As you continue to develop and maintain your paperless office, following your simple naming convention, along with a logical and well-defined "folder structure" will go a long way to keeping your electronic documents organized and efficient.

Paperless Office Best Practices - Define a Naming Convention Standard For Your Paperless Office

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Fujitsu Scansnap S1500 Document Scanner - The Best Way To Go Paperless

!±8± Fujitsu Scansnap S1500 Document Scanner - The Best Way To Go Paperless

The Fujitsu Scansnap s1500 document scanner is a good way to clean up all of those documents that is important, but are cluttering up your home or office. This scanner will allow you to keep those important documents while at the same time keeping your work area neat and clean.

The features of this scanner not only let you de-clutter the area of paper, but it makes it easy and orderly as well. Find out where you can get a good deal on this machine.

How The Fujitsu Scansnap s1500 Scanner Benefits You

The main benefit to you is that this machine practically works on its own. Once you load it up and push the button you can set back and let it work it's magic. It has a 50-page automatic document feeder and paper feed detection so you can load in documents of different sizes with no problem.

With the one button searchable PDF creation, and the Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard that it comes with your documents can be saved as one neat PDF file.

Another benefit for you is the speed and accuracy of this machine. It scans up to twenty double-sided pages per minute and that paper-feed detection I mentioned earlier allows it to detect the page size and coloration of the documents and that includes black and white documents. This machine makes sure that your copies are true to the originals.

This scanner makes scanning so easy for you. It automatically rotates, crops and de-skews documents and you can set it to automatically increase the resolution of small documents to make it easy for you to see the finer print.

What Owners Of The Fujitsu Scansnap s1500 Document Scanner Thought

One of the big points a lot of owners talked about was the speed in which it scans documents. It was also pointed out that because it scans both sides of a document at the same time at 20 pages a minute that it's more like 40 pages a minute.

The quality of the scans also stood out. Some even mentioned that even though this was a document scanner, it also did very good photo scans. The one button operation was a huge hit for most. Some folks mentioned how they shoved different size documents of different orientations and colors (including black & white) and how they scanned perfectly without them doing any thing more than pushing a button.

They even loved the fact that it didn't take much room even though some were surprised at the small size of the machine.

My Conclusion

As you know there are pros and cons with all things. I told you about the pros so here are some of the cons. One thing is that even though the scanner can hold 40-50 sheets the output tray will sometimes start to jam after a 20 to 25 sheet feed.

The feeder has a tendency to double feed at times so the documents have to be placed in gently. The scanner doesn't have a TWAIN driver, so you can't scan through programs like Photoshop or CorelDraw and some folks don't like that.

Though these cons are a bit of a nuisance most owners consider them very miner and worth going through when compared with the positive of the Fujitsu Scansnap s1500 document scanner.

Fujitsu Scansnap S1500 Document Scanner - The Best Way To Go Paperless

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