If you don’t know me well enough yet, let me clue you into one of my missions – I want to help people work smarter, not harder.  I actually have a negative emotional response when I see people working so hard to complete a task that could be done much quicker.

Today, I’m going to talk about one thing you can do to create a much more efficient work environment.  I want you to consider going paperless.  This means that you document your operations through electronic files or using different software systems rather than printing everything out for support.  Don’t think I’m suggesting you don’t need to document your work, I’m just suggesting we throw out the pen and paper.

I first learned about a paperless work environment as an auditor.  I loved the system and have tried to help others establish it since that time.  You’ll be amazed how much time AND paper you’ll save.  But, it’s an investment and there are a few things you’ll need.

1. Dual monitors – Here’s the deal.  We are taking away the piece of paper on your desk and we are now referring to it as support in an electronic format.  You won’t save a second of time if you don’t have a second monitor so you can easily view your support on one screen and use the other screen for the task you are trying to complete.
2. Scanner – I’ll challenge you that you can get almost everything you’ll need in an electronic format – i.e. bank statements, invoices, credit card statements.  But, that will be true for 75-80% of the time.  You’ll still need to get a scanner to get your paper support into an electronic format.  Since I don’t do a lot of scanning, I have a little desktop/portable scanner like this one to scan in receipts, etc.
3. Adobe Acrobat – Now since we are going paperless, you are going to get far more comfortable with PDFs.  Rather than writing on  or signing actual documents, you’ll be doing this all electronically.  With Adobe Acrobat (or any similar program) you can insert/delete pages in a file, you can insert comment boxes, you can put “stamps” on the documents, you can highlight text, etc.  You can do everything you could do before with an actual piece of paper, but now it’ll be cleaner and easier to read!
4. A Plan – This is probably the hardest step to get through.  You are going to want to think about your current work processes and create a plan on how you are going to organize and file all of these electronic files.  There are document management programs out there that can attach a lot of great information to your documents and let you organize it.  As an auditor, I used ProSystems fx Engagement.  It allowed several people to sign-off on files for approval or include notes to correct certain issues.  Now, if you don’t need something too sophisticated, you can go with a simple folder system and saving your support in a meaningful organization.  I would suggest at least splitting out your files by function and then by month.For example, someone can go to one place and find all of your bills for the year and then look in the February folder and see what was paid in that month.  Then, you might have another area with all of your bank reconciliations.  You can always restrict access to certain folders so not just anyone can see these files.  You still want to protect yourself from employee theft or fraud, so consider what some possible risks there are and how you can mitigate them.

Well, that is what you’ll need to do to implement a paperless environment.  I hope that you’ll consider moving in that direction and becoming a much more efficient workplace.  Now, what are you going to do with all that extra time on your hands?

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