There is a lot of debate as to whether there is any such thing as a paperless office.  Perhaps this is an ideal we can never truly achieve, but I do believe it’s something worth striving for.  I mean, just because you can’t achieve perfection doesn’t mean you give up trying and settle for crap, right?  So why shouldn’t we at least get as close to paperless as we possibly can?

If you are going to try for a paperless office, the first thing you need to do is scan and get rid of existing paperwork.  That sends the message that it’s no longer allowed.  If you don’t have the scanners or manpower to do this yourself, you might benefit by hiring a document imaging service to do it for you.

Another thing you need is to make sure your machines can handle all of the digitized paperwork.  You might want to install a network with a shared hard drive, if you don’t already have one, so that your employees can all access the paperwork at any time.  Also if you have a lot of paperwork to digitize, you might also want to conssider looking into some sort of management software to keep track of it all.

Once you get all the existing paperwork scanned, you might want to consider investing in some high quality scanners so that you can keep it up as you get more paperwork in.  You will probably also need a PDF writer so that you can create and send documents in PDF instead of on paper.

The beauty of it is, with just a few tools such as these you can save a ton of money on paper, printer ink, and postage — not to mention you can save tons of trees and save landfills from getting quite as much paper trash as they were before.

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