Go paperless with your business.
Explore top tips for taking your business operations entirely online.
The benefits of taking your business paperless are plentiful. Physically, it saves tons of space (goodbye filing cabinets). Environmentally, it saves mounds of paper. Organizationally, it streamlines your archiving process and makes finding documents quick and efficient. Yet mentally, the transition can be a little daunting. First, there’s the sheer volume of work that goes into digitizing all your paper trails. And, there can be that nagging fear of security (what if my system gets hacked?).
If you’re thinking about going paperless but don’t know where or how to start, follow these tips to set up a process that feels manageable, secure, and efficient.
How to go paperless.
Going paperless is as much a culture shift as it is a technological shift. Follow some of these tips to ease your workplace into a paperless one.
- Involve your staff. Gather a representative group of employees from across your business to get a sense of how people would use the system and what they want to see. This will help you create a solid, streamlined foundation for paperless organization.
- Create a sound organizational system. Map out your organizational file structure and protocols. After what year would you consider a document “archived” ? What's the “expiration date” for shredding documents that are no longer needed? Do you want to organize files by year? Team? Client? Operational area? What’s your file naming convention?
- Develop and streamline the digitizing process. There are tons of ways to actually digitize files. You can scan them into a document cloud system or digital server. You can contract with a document digitizing firmor use scanning and document management apps.
- Divide the labor. Divide the digitizing work across teams so that there’s equal representation and responsibility, and consider designating one team member as the leader in this process to build a sense of responsibility and investment.
Do more online.
A paperless workplace is also a more secure one. Explore how Acrobat Sign can help you use digital documents to securely collaborate, sign, and share.
