The paperless office

As the requirements to retain ever greater volumes of paper-based information increases so does the cost of storing and retrieving it, yet it is a legal requirement to maintain many records for at least six years. This builds up to very considerable volumes and it is a major business cost to archive and index these.

As a firm we took the decision some seven years ago that we would move to a paperless environment. The benefits for us are that documents can be archived and retrieved in a fraction of the time taken before and, of course, is significantly more environmentally friendly.

Of course, it was not without pain. It was vital that in the transition documents were correctly archived and catalogued to prevent the paper archive, which was difficult and time consuming to access, descending into digital docu-mess of unsearchable images. If you are considering going down this route then before you consider the physical transition from paper to scanned images it is vital that you plan how to organise and record each document processed.

To achieve the transition we used our division Acacia Services.