How to Take Steps Towards a Paperless Office
It’s 2018, you have a pile of paper in your home office, a filing cabinet at work, and your child just handed you a new apprenticeship form that you must fax to their teacher for some reason. If this doesn’t sound like the paperless future promised you, you’re right. Luckily, you don’t have to do a lot of work with all the PDFs you have (or are about to create). A scanner, smartphone, and some cloud storage services are all you need to turn the stack of papers on your desk into a paperless wonderland.
First, get your signature on file
Stamping your name on documents is probably half the reason you get physical copies of them at all. Contracts, authorization receipts, invoices all require a signature and are easier to sign and edit when you are using the digital version. If you’ve already scanned your documents (or received them by email) and need to sign them, the next step is to import your real signature (weird handwritten font is not required). Using a desktop or mobile device, you can easily import your signature if you follow the instructions on each platform . If the thought of storing a signature on your computer makes you feel uncomfortable, you can always import your signature as mentioned earlier and delete it when you’re done.
Having a signature makes it easy to fill out forms with multiple signature fields. Even if you need to fax this official document to someone, you can use a signed digital file using a service like FaxZero or Scanbot Pro and send it without hearing a dial tone (although you may have to pay a dollar or two to avoid faxes with company logo watermarks). In short, e-signatures are convenient, useful for getting out of paper, and can save you a headache if you need to sign and send something as a last resort.
You may need a real scanner
Putting one page on your desk, aligning and holding your phone level to take a photo, take a photo, and repeat the process on the next page can distract you from scanning the rest of your documents, especially if you have a pile of old papers and a busy day at work.
Instead of tiring your hands when holding your phone over your desk, grab a home scanner. It can process multiple documents at the same time and will make your paperless office less time-consuming when it comes to document processing compared to using your smartphone to take a photo of every page you want to digitize.
With a dedicated scanner (preferably with a multi-page document feeder), you can process stacks of paper at once, get high-quality scans without worrying about corners and lighting, and automatically place them in cloud storage. Access via other apps or devices (more on this later). Plus, using a dedicated scanner makes it easier to get the job done without being distracted after scanning multiple documents, checking Twitter to see what new memes are available on the market.
Start with a scanning app
This does not mean that your smartphone will not be a suitable scanning tool. Having a mobile scanner will definitely save you a few steps if all you need to do is save a copy of the receipt from yesterday’s lunch or if you need to send someone a signed form right away and don’t want to waste time. receiving files from a computer or waiting for them to be downloaded from a home scanner to a cloud storage destination.
On the app side , Scanbot for iOS or Android is a full featured option, perfect for capturing any document in front of you and sending it to its destination, whether it’s your cloud storage account or a Slack message to a colleague. After scanning documents, you can annotate the scanned image and add signatures to documents with your finger (another way not to store it on your computer). Scanbot automatically detects documents in the camera, corrects perspective to align photographed documents, and supports QR code scanning.
Scanbot is free to use, but an in-app purchase unlocks additional features vital to a paperless office. Optical Character Recognition detects important information (names, phone numbers, email addresses) and makes it easy to interact with the full text of a document and search for it when you need to find one specific segment in a scanned document or contact information on someone’s business card.
Document scanning apps are legion in the App Store, but you should only use well-received apps like Scanbot or subscription- based CamScanner and avoid apps that lull you to sleep with in- app purchases to unlock features that usually come as standard (or at least as part of one in-app purchase).
Link your documents to services
With all these scanned documents, you undoubtedly have a folder where they end up. But keeping them in the same folder on your computer prevents you from using the digital version of your bills, contracts, receipts and other paper-based documents. Organizing your documents with tags or a smarter file naming system will make it easier to find what you’re looking for. Configuring your scanner to automatically dump all scanned documents to a folder accessible in the cloud using something like Google Drive or Dropbox should be done ahead of time so you can easily keep track of what you are digitizing and what you can get rid of.
In his Cult of Mac article on creating your own paperless office, John Brownlee shared how he set up an inbox for his scanned documents using IFTTT, Dropbox, and Evernote. When documents arrive in the specified folder, IFTTT copies them to Evernote, where it then organizes them with the appropriate names and tags. If you want to organize your documents, you can sort them by type and place them in the appropriate folders (receipts, taxes, health information, etc.). As with organizing photos, everyone works with files differently, so choose the style that’s right for you.
If you’re not a fan of Evernote, you can store them in a service like OneNote to tag and name documents. Store them on your Mac? Finder’s built-in tags can help you sort and separate urgent documents like invoices from less important documents like receipts. No matter where you store them or whatever you call them, having them in the cloud will make it easier to retrieve and edit information on these scraps of paper. The only question left to answer is: what are you going to do with all this useless paper?