How do I become a paperless office without hiring someone to do nothing but scan?

How do small businesses go paperless? I have twelve-four drawer file cabinets and am out of space. But it seems like it will take forever to scan each document, rename it, put it in the right folder. How do other companies do this? Is there a trick to doing it without hiring another person? Is certain hardware better than others?

Thanks,

Jane

Hi,
I work at Suitesonline.com which provides online bookkeeping services to small business, and we come accross this question all the time.

The first step is to buy an automatic scanner that scans at least 20 pages per min (ppm). This is for your future scanning needs if you want to go paperless.

Regarding your existing documents, you can start with a plan to scan a certain number of those document each day and index them. This way if you are organized you can have all documents scanned and indexed in a couple of months.

If you find you are lagging behind after a couple of weeks, as suggested previously, go with a scanning company. Note that professional scanners charge more than a chain like Kinkos or UPS store, but do a higher quality work. So shop around.

The next tough question for you is how do you organize your scanned documents, ie. index and manage them?

We use Sidomac for our bookkeeping clients. Take a look at Sidomac - www.sidomac.com. But it might be too expensive, unless you are a business, in which case you can use good old windows folders.

- V

If I were you, I would certainly outsource it to a professional company. There are companies out there who will scan/collate your documents for you. As you've probably guessed, it's not cheap but it definitely beats doing it yourself (hardly the best use of your time, I'm sure). I guess it depends on how much you want to go paperless. :-)

Incidentally, professional scanning companies use state-of-the-art scanners (like large photocopiers and about as fast) and these cost about $10K-40K!