How To Use Your Mac And A Scanner To Create The Dream: A Paperless Office

For many businesses, the holy grail of daily operations is a paperless office. Think about how great that would be.

No more paper. No more file cabinets. Every document is a file and every file is available to your Mac, Windows PC, iPhone or iPad. Transferring your office to paperless is easier said than done, but it can start with Paperless.

Create A File, Save A Tree

The reasons to go paperless are many and varied, and are different for every business operation. High on top of the list is the word ‘green.’ Create digital files, save a few trees.

Paperless is an elegant and relatively inexpensive Mac app that can help an office move from paper and storage to a completely digital, therefore, paperless, operation.

To get started you’ll need the Paperless app, your Mac, and a scanner. After all, those documents which were formerly trees have to get digitized to be stored.

Paperless makes the process of converting from using tree parts to a digital office mostly painless. Mostly. There’s still that initial curve to get older documents digitized.

The app itself is straightforward, and with a good scanner, gives your Mac all the tools needed to scan receipts, bills, business cards, statements, invoices, legal documents, and mostly anything else.

Think of iTunes or iPhoto but with digital documents instead of music or photos.

Click on the image above for a larger, pop up view with more detail.

Once the document scanning begins there’s a need to organize digitized documents in such a way that files are easily retrieved and viewed.

Paperless helps with that, too, and provides a sidebar list of files in the Library (again, similar to iTunes and iPhoto).

If all of this sounds like a utopian paradise, just remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day.

There’s work involved in scanning and organizing documents.

Paperless works with a variety of scanners for the Mac, and is probably perfect for a home office, or small office with a local network of Macs.

Here’s the problem I see with going paperless (not that there are not storage and safety and security issued with papers filed in cabinets or boxes).

Backup. Suddenly all those scanned files, safely tucked away into a Mac or Mac mini server, become valuable. What happens if the Mac’s disk storage crashes?

What’s the backup plan for a paperless office? In a future article I’ll explain how one of my company’s offices went totally paperless, and the expense and effort it took to create a fail-safe backup system.

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