How a Paperless Office can make your business life easier?

The paperless office will simplify the life of any advisor on many fronts. It will mean the elimination of original and copies of documents. For example, in an office when a client brings in their documents they can immediately be scanned into a system and then returned to them. With a paper less office could mean a reduction in the amount or the elimination of storage space needed in an office.

With a paperless office no more filing cabinets. Less reliance on personnel for filing. But what exactly is a paperless office?

It is when all documents are scanned and stored. The documents can be annotated, indexed and searched. This means with a paperless office just as you do with paper with post-it notes, the same flags can be placed on image files, highlight particular files if you wish. Print, fax or send images which means everything that you can do with a piece of paper is possible.

In fact for a quick search you can even set up your files just like the index cards you used to use in the library at school. This way you can quickly search using the capability of the computer for a document. Look for documents based on words and numbers. Documents can be viewed, printed, faxed, or sent as an image file to an end user.

But before you get all excited there are going some tools you are going to need for a paperless office. You first need storage media; there are a variety of choices. You can store items on the hard drive or on disks. Put them on CDs, DVDs, and tapes. Put it on any type of storage media that any computer system uses.

You have to decide how often and when you are going to use the information. How quickly you want to retrieve it and how many people are going to be using the system at the same time. What are the capabilities of your computer to process the images, which mean computing power. Speed is important, you will need a fast enough processor and lots of memory.

You need the ability to scan an image document. There are two types of scanner the flat bed scanner, which inexpensive and easy to use, however not very effective for this type of work you will have to open the top put the paper down, center and scan. The high speed scanner is just like a copier in that you can have a feeder a device that takes legal or letter size paper. In a paperless office, the scanner is the center of your office document production.

Most importantly is the software that can index and search for documents. The type of software that you will use is going to depend on how you are going to search. In their practice the software has multiple platforms.

Which means just as you have file folders with windows such is the case with client file folders on the computer open up the folder and see the documents on screen. But software that searches by indexing or the most advanced software will search by optical character recognition (OCR).

Here the software literally reads the document and is able to identify words, groups of words or numbers and allows you to search by using this criteria to find a match. This is extremely helpful if you are looking for something in a 300-page document.

You are also going to need people who know how to use the equipment. Experts recommend hiring a service to do your conversion and then hire computer literate people to scan in house.

The future of the paperless office will have an affect on your interaction with clients in a couple of ways. Clients will "sign" forms on computers electronically. Transfers from bank accounts to investment accounts will be measured by nano-seconds. All transactions will be made right on a screen in front of a client, giving them instant validation.

So it is up to you will you be standing there with file folders, pencils and erasers in your hands? Or will you be part of paperless office evolution, which will mean serving clients with the most efficient and cost effective standard, created to date?

Taming the Paperless Tiger by Faxing

By Kevin Cork (The Screaming Capitalist)

Tired of the three-foot stack of scrap paper that is couriered to your office every week? Sick of buying fax paper so companies can send you the latest 42 page update to the French version of their prospectus or an announcement of the inside sales rep's newest puppy?

Go Paperless

One of the biggest administrative challenges of our business is finding an efficient method of dealing with the amount of paper that arrives each day. A typical week may see couriers showing up several times a day, mail arriving daily and fax lines constantly in use.

Go Paperless

Further, in a busy office with quite a few reps, it is probably standard practice to make sure everyone in the office is kept up to date with notices, bulletins and updates so even a single page fax may be photocopied a dozen times. How many of us have given up struggling through this weekly deluge and end up missing some vital piece of information?

"Oh, really, that favorite hot shot small cap manager of mine DIED last year???"

What we need is a system or strategy that allows us to receive the information easily, cheaply, conveniently and simply and THEN allows us to re-direct, copy, edit, sort and store that same information without someone spending ALL DAY on it. Sound like a fantasy?

Sending Faxes One of those things that gives me a secret thrill involves a vat of warm cherry Jello and three eels and I promised not to talk about that.

The OTHER thing is watching someone who makes $250,000 a year create a document on their computer and then get up to spend 15 minutes to print it off, handwrite a fax cover page and stand over the fax machine hand-feeding single sheets in one at a time.

Whoo HOO! Never mind the illicit sales of hotels, THIS particular activity is costing the nation billions of dollars of lost productivity. And the solution is pretty simple:

FAX THE %$#^&$ DOCUMENT FROM YOUR COMPUTER!