Free Up Office Space:  Get Rid of the File Cabinets and Start Scanning Your Documents

Are you tired of always having to comb through a mountain of papers when trying to find a specific document? Have you been looking for an alternative? Well, luckily, there is one, and it’s called a paperless office. But how does it work?

A paperless office in a nutshell

The basic idea behind having a paperless office is being comfortable, organized, and free from needless clutter. This is achieved by scanning all of the documents in your office by using document scanning services. Once digitalized, you can proceed to upload them to your personal cloud, where they’re neatly organized into folders and categories. Often times, the solution also has a search engine that scans the title and the contents of the documents, allowing to quickly and easily find exactly the thing you’re looking for.

Document shredding: yes or no?

The answer to that question depends on what you’re trying to achieve. If your main objective is to eliminate as much clutter in your office as possible, then you should – by all means – go for it. The same applies if you’re uncomfortable with unauthorized individuals getting their hands on your bills or something similar. However, you should never shred the documents you’d have a hard time missing, like important research, your academic papers, passports, or similar. Obviously, these should be kept in their original state (however, you can still scan them if you wish).

Security of the online cloud environment

One of the most common doubts people are having when trying to migrate their documents to the cloud is the security of the cloud environment. While various cyber security experts will often give you conflicting advice on the subject, the fact remains you can make the environment even more secure by encrypting the files you consider to be sensitive. This can be achieved by using a dedicated application, or simply by using your favourite file compression solution.

Don’t get lazy, keep things organized!

Even after everything is neatly scanned and uploaded to the cloud, your work is not quite done yet. The next thing you need to do is group every document into appropriate folders are categories. You can organize them however you wish, but the system you’re using has to make sense to you and feel intuitive. For example, you may group business documents by placing them in a dedicated folder, then drill it down even more into specific categories (planning and research, accounting, etc.)

The importance of making backups

In a digital world, backups are important to have, especially if you’ve decided to shred the physical documents. Just ask yourself what you would do in case something happens to your digital copies? A good practice is to copy the files into a separate external hard drive every once in a while, just to remain on the safe side and retain your peace of mind at all times.

Conclusion

Having a paperless office is the way of the future. In the end, it’s all about productivity, and this is exactly what it will help you achieve.