By Eric Böhnisch-Volkmann of DEVONtechnologies

While working from a home office often means that we deal a lot with electronic information, there is still paper coming in. It’s hard to integrate with the rest of our workflow and it needs storage space — space that many of us don’t have. To get rid of most of the paper is not hard. Here’s what you need:

1) A computer (when you can read this posting, you already have one)
2) A scanner
3) Some software

For the scanner, a document scanner is of course preferable. Good choices are the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners as well as the Avision-made document scanners. But also any flatbed scanner is fine as long as it’s fast enough for the paper volume that you want to digitize. And, of course, you need a driver for it, so make sure the scanner you get is compatible for your computer, be it a Mac, a Windows PC, or a Linux box (e.g. the Fujitsu ScanSnap is available in different Mac and Windows editions.)

Scanning document does not require a super-high resolution such as photos, maybe even a grayscale or black/white scan is fine and consumes a lot less space on disk. Scan with 150 dpi if you don’t want make the content of the document searchable with optical character recognition (OCR) later, scan with 600 dpi for maximum flexibility. See if your scan software is able to scan to PDF. PDF files are standardized, compressed, and can contain more than just one page. Most scan applications also allow to scan multiple pages into one PDF file, document scanners usually pack all pages that are scanned in one batch into one single PDF file (can depend on the settings).

Now you can name the PDF file and save it to whatever place you find appropriate in your workflow, it could be a folder on your hard disk or a network server, an online service, or a document management application such as DEVONthink Pro Office for the Mac Give it a good, meaningful name so that you can easily identify it without spending time to open it in Acrobat. If you want to make the PDF searchable, run OCR on it, then file the converted PDF and trash the raw original.

Some file their incoming paper separately from their electronic documents, some do not. Whatever suits you best. Personally, I am storing scanned papers together with all electronic communication, namely email messages and IM chat logs, in one structure and separated only in a few sub-categories. The easier your system is to use the better. Adding more structure rarely brings much benefit, especially as your computer can easily search for your files regardless of where they are located.

Do you need a document management application? This depends on your needs. DEVONthink Pro Office, for example, comes with an integrated paper capture module that lets you directly scan into the database, runs OCR on incoming papers, has a sophisticated search functions, and assists you with classification and see-also functions based on artificial intelligence. In addition it manages email and chat logs and lets your access your archive from other computers in your home or over the Internet. But if you don’t need all this, simple folders in your file system are just fine.

So, going paperless is easier that it sounds. And if you consequently follow the ‘paperless office’ approach you’ll end up keeping only a few important papers: contracts, invoices, and everything that your tax authorities require you to save for them.

Side note: DEVONtechnologies gives our readers 25 percent discount on all their products. Read more about it here. – Grant Griffiths