The paperless office

About a year ago we decided to make our entire operation as paperless as possible. This means we basically scan and shred anything that isn't a contract, or a document for which we're required by law to keep the original.

All invoices, letters, etc. are scanned regularly using a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M (since it's made for Mac, scans a batch of sheets really fast and can do two-sided scanning), hooked up to Paperless. Scanning is fast and pretty much painless, and we only enter limited meta data for every file (date, sender, category, amount (in case of invoices), etc) so we can have Paperless generate fancy reports on money spent on ping-pong balls (to name a thing), or search for all letters sent by client X. The software that comes with the ScanSnap is great at performing OCR (optical character recognition), so the contents of the PDF's are searchable, which is pretty awesome.

After scanning and verifying the PDF is okay, we shred the original document using a cross-cut shredder. Since the original is really, really gone by then we need to make sure we have backups of the PDF's in different locations. We share the files using Dropbox, so that's off-site location number one. In addition we back-up our machines using Time Machine, and third we sync the PDF's using JungleDisk to Rackspace Cloud Files (off-site number two).

We're really happy we made the transition to a paperless office. Less clutter, scans are accessible anywhere and it's easy to find any document. Give it a try, I'm sure you'll love it: less clutter on your desk and in your bookcase, less clutter in your head.