One of the best reasons to digitize your company’s documents are the environmental or “green” benefits.

The combination of less damage to the environment and the money one can save by not having to store large volumes of paper is irresistible.

An article over at treehugger.com has a great list of places to get started in overhauling your office.

• Ahrend Eco-friendly office furniture
• AusPen Refillable white board markers & links
• EcoWork eco-friendly office furniture
• ForestChoice pencils from certified-sustainable cedar
• Geämi eco-friendly packing and shipping materials

That’s only a small part of the list – head over to their site for the rest. Of course, along with all of that, you’ll want to make sure your documents and files are digitized. Contact us now for a quote or more information.

Mashable has an excellent article on 13 tech tools for creating a paperless office and life. Most of these address how to make your business function once you’ve had the work completed to make yourself paperless.

I definitely would’ve recommend most of the scanning options there, particularly the ones that work with your phone. When you’re eliminating/digitizing your old documents, there’s no use creating subpar files.

Get it done right, and by professionals. Scanning gas station receipts is one thing, but when dealing with your most important files, you want clear, perfect versions.

It seems as if futurists and business efficiency experts have been ushering in the age of the paperless office forever.

How long has this been going on exactly? Let’s turn to Wikipedia.

The “paperless office” was a publicist’s slogan, intended to describe the office of the future. It was facilitated by the popularization of video display computer terminals like the 1964 IBM 2260. An early prediction of the paperless office was made in a 1975 Business Week article.

The idea was that office automation would make paper redundant for routine tasks such as record-keeping and bookkeeping, and it came to prominence with the introduction of the personal computer.

While technology was supposed to bring in the age of the paperless office, the technological advancement of the commercial copy machine actually set it back. When it because cheaper and faster to make massive amounts of copies and printouts, people went ahead and did so.

It’s only now – when digital storage and cloud computing are reaching extreme levels of speed and affordability – that the paperless office is truly in reach.

One of the primary reasons to scan business documents is that paper, quite simply, doesn’t last forever, or at least not in a usable state. Digital is forever, and with no deterioration.

In any case, after digitizing your documents, you’ll likely have some of the originals that you’ll want to (or need to, legally) store for the long term. No matter how careful you are in storing your documents they will eventually deteriorate, and this can be accelerated by exposure to excess light, mold, fire, water, humidity and/or insects and rodents.

To best combat these conditions, it’s best to store your older papers and documents – which you no longer need on-hand because you’ve digitized them with Scandoc – in a cool, dry place, high off the ground and in a fire-resistant space. An insured commercial storage locker as opposed to the shed behind your house, for instance. We can help point you in the right direction.

An additional form of protection can be a polyester encasement, often used for brittle, fragile and deteriorating manuscripts, maps and other single leaf documents. This method was developed by the Library of Congress, and offers significant advantages over other, more basic procedures.