Paperless office... document management ? (High speed scanner)

[Tim]

On Fri, 2011-04-01 at 09:58 -0600, Linuxguy123 wrote:
> So... our home office is growing and we are getting swamped by paper.
> Invoices, receipts, billing records, printed correspondence, etc.
>
> ...
>  
> While scanning most of the paper in our office will eliminate the
> physical paper, how do we manage the documents once they are on a
> computer ?

Don't forget to plan for contingencies.

I know of at least one business that only managed to stay in business,
when their computer system died, because they still did manual
invoicing.  Without that, they wouldn't know who owed them money, or
vice versa.  

Yes, backup, backup, and backup.  But that doesn't do you much good if
you can't read the backup.  And for some businesses, you need to always
know your state of affairs, the hours, or days, of waiting for the
backup to be resurrected could be deadly.  Even more so, when people
foolishly romp into the back-up on a compromised machine, rather than
test the machine, or use a different isolated machine.

And what happens when you come into conflict with a client, or a
business that you're a client of, when original paperwork *needs* to be
presented?  Whether that be to resolve the conflict directly, or in
court.

For myself, I buy and sell on paper, log things on the computer, and
just use the computer as the handy dandy record searching machine.  I'm
reminded of the old advice for starting a business:  Always pay by
cheque, you have the stubs as the start of your audit trail.

Some twenty years later, and I can't say that I'm swamped with
paperwork.  A little disorganised, perhaps, but *far* less than one
filing cabinet full, and still 100% readable.  I can't say the same for
various computer files that I've used in the meantime.

... We cut back on paperwork.  Now we use A5 sheets of paper...  ;-)

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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