As I discussed in an earlier post, the idea of a paperless office has been around for a long time. I’m sure everyone understands the concept of document scanning – capturing an image on an electronic device and storing it for future reference. I wonder if people know one important side effect to this practice?

Scanning every document in your office is going to save you storage space and eliminate the need for clerical staff. Obviously, your paper and printing costs will be greatly reduced. Maybe the most cost-effective aspect of document scanning is the organisational efficiencies available to businesses that make the technology leap.

Case Study

Let’s take a common scenario involving the customer invoice. When you make a sale, you produce an invoice and send it to the customer. Months later, your customer calls and asks if you can forward them a signed copy of the invoice and the associated purchase order. They’ve had a change of personnel and can’t find their records. You locate the invoice - properly filed in the customer folder - only to discover it has two purchase orders and neither of them are in the file. After a big of digging, you locate all the documents required by the customer. You scan a copy of all three documents and send them off. An hour is gone from your day but your client is happy. The documents are shuffled on your desk and are accidently misfiled creating a future problem to be discovered at a later date.

Intelligent Results

A document scanning system would allow you to access an electronic copy of the invoice along with all attached documents immediately. It would also allow you to see a complete history of all invoicing for that particular customer, payment history and any outstanding issues. By capturing and storing your critical business documents, you’re also giving yourself a massive amount of business intelligence available for use any time you might need it.

Yes, green technology and the paperless office is getting a lot of attention lately. Solving the age-old business problem of increasing the efficiency of your staff is a very welcome side effect to going green.

How has a document scanning helped your business?