Once you start working in your home office, by the time goes you can see plenty of paper documents are getting stacked in each corner of your office, resulting in a mess. Whenever a document is urgently required, you need to find through a lot of papers to get that particular one. Committing to having a paperless office and getting a positive result from it isn’t a myth.  

While on the phone with the client, you are always going to need required files within moments, because definitely, you don’t want to put the client on hold. However, using paper documents is never going to help you in doing your work fast. It takes time to work with paper documents. You need to get up from your desk, search for the paper, courier the files if needed, and then need to wait for the courier company to deliver your paper. The whole work process is time-consuming, which might affect your company’s productivity. Plus using paper documents can be dangerous as well because paper documents can be stolen, damaged, or modified.  

Taking control of your documents is not such a big deal; the concept of document management comes to your rescue to provide you direct document solutions. You just need to stick to your commitment to having a paperless office.

 Yes, it is also true that you cannot get rid of all the papers from your office just like that. Some documents like notary, deeds are required to be stored as paper documents for legal reasons which you cannot avoid. However, for other documents, you can always choose digitalization. 

 Before going into more details to know how you can digitize your paper documents, look at some benefits which you can have if you consider going green.

Efficiency

As mentioned before, having complete control of your data means you do not need to go through all the documents of your office to find a piece of paper. Only you need to click or type in your computer for the file you are searching, and that file is going to be in front of you within seconds.

Less Expense

While you are removing the paper from your office, you do not need to pay for papers, printing ink, or cabinets to store them, which eventually results in savings. Plus handling electronic documents means you don’t need to spend your money on courier companies because you can share the documents via e-mail.

More Access

Using digital documents authorizes you to access your files any time; you don’t need to get up from your desk to get your files. You can work on your data by sitting in the comfort of your home.

Data Security

Electronic documents can be secured using passwords, which you cannot do in case of paper documents. Plus paper documents can be damaged due to some accidents like fire or flood; which you never need to worry about while working with digital documents. Learn some effective way to protect them from these disasters from CNBC.

Helping the Environment

Reducing the use of paper can help in saving the trees, which means you are helping the environment by taking a step forward. 

So if you think the reasons are enough to move to a paperless home office then let’s see how you can digitize your documents for going paperless.

Digitizing Documents

You need to complete some procedure to digitize your documents permanently.

At first, you need to take your time and go through all the paper documents in your office to find out the documents that you are never going to use in the future. Getting rid of those documents can help you keep your office clean.

After that, sort out those documents that you need to store as in paper document format; as mentioned earlier, those can be used for any legal or taxation purpose.

Now you have those documents which are not related to legal purpose but can be useful. You can store those documents electronically, and here comes the concept of paperless document management into play.

Many organizations have already implemented document management solution into their work process to manage their workflow. How the system works– that is all you need to know. The document management software (DMS) comes with many benefits. Mainly it digitalizes your data, store it securely, and helps you retrieve any document within moments. On the other hand, the DMS also works on behalf of you if it is programmed in the right way.

The way the DMS works is quite straight-forward, explaining the work procedure in step-by-step.

• By using a high-speed scanner, all your paper documents can be scanned as digital documents. Other documents like e-mails, software-generated results get captured into the system by DMS.
• After scanning and capturing all the data get sorted according to their purpose. This process is crucial because, in this step, the indexing process happens; which helps while searching for a document. While using DMS, you can search for your documents using keywords, phrases, or plain text, which is never possible while continuing your work with paper documents.
• After indexing, all the data gets stored securely either in your office-server or in the cloud. Mostly home office or small business owners prefer cloud to store the documents.
• Your file is now ready for retrieval; you can retrieve any files to work on it, e-mail it, share it. You do not need to wait while the courier company delivers your file.

Features of DMS are:

• You can scan your paper documents into other file formats like PDF directly.
• Cloud computing allows you to get access to your data any time you want. You can use any device which has an active internet connection; that can be your smartphone, and you can get hands-on your data.
• Repetitive works, generating an invoice using some application in your system can be quickly done by the DMS itself. It is possible because the DMS can automate some work process by incorporating with other software on your computer.
• DMS comes along with some security measures, which gives your data additional security to keep them away from the hackers.

Having an organized office and ‘always ready to retrieve data’ is going to make your work process smooth; which obviously results in great productivity. Accept the benefits of digitalization, and no one can stop the success of your home office.