The ‘paperless office’

 

The dream from the moment computers became mainstream. All work done on the computer, and saved and stored on the computer.

With the advent of email, the strive for a paperless world seemed almost complete. Yet still we sit in our offices staring at piles of paper, use filing cabinets and, in many cases, pay a smallish sum a month to store documents in an off-site storage facility. We have, and probably could, go on like this for years. There is, however, a simple solution: scan your important paper archives and store them digitally. For us there are three main reasons why you should scan important or archived documents.

  1. We are all well aware that office space comes at a premium, particularly in larger or capital cities, and scanning documents that are currently stored in bulky filing cabinets or in off-site storage can really free up space. This could allow you to bring in that extra bit of office equipment to help everyone’s work life run more smoothly, or indeed, bring in an additional desk to start that apprentice scheme you’ve been thinking about. Freeing up space in the office can be an important factor in helping your business to grow and scanning archived documents can have a massive impact.
  2. Looking through paper archives takes time. Sad but true. Perhaps they’ve been put together in a rush, not labeled properly and every divider or paper folder has to be looked through to find that one document. If they’re stored in an off-site location, add that into the mix and you are easily looking at one staff member spending half a day looking for one document. Making the decision to scan these documents using appropriate software means you can also reference them appropriately and in the future, find the document you need with a one word search.
  3. Security is a natural concern and many businesses have action plans in the event of a fire in the office or at other locations. Thankfully such catastrophic losses are rare, but paper documents are still susceptible to damage through ageing and incorrect storage and can often start to disintegrate. Scanning important and archived documents and making duplicate copies to be stored in different locations can help preserve archived documents and keep important information secure. Not to mention being very easy to find!

At TipTop Media we use Kodak Capture Pro for our scanning jobs. Using Kodak Capture Pro helps us to protect against any indexing errors with the improved Double Data Indexing feature, provides the client with optimal image quality through Intelligent Quality Control and offers a more secure option when converting with the ability to output to a password encrypted/protected PDF. We can scan all types of documents, from simple text documents to official certificates and colourful promotional materials. Confidentiality is our prime concern and we will always provide you with a time and cost estimate. In addition, once your job is complete, we can store the hard drive, usb stick or cd of your converted documents in our climate controlled storage facility.

If you would like to find out more about scanning your documents with TipTop Media please email colin@tiptopmedia.co.uk or call us on 020 3234 0090.