The Paperless Office
Mitchell Jay Weiss · Journal of accountancy online/Journal of accountancy · 1994
If your client or employer is like most organizations, its filing cabinets are loaded to capacity and tucked into every corner of expensive office space, with the overflow carted off to inconvenient off-premises storage facilities. As a result, it can take hours, if not days, to track down some documents. For most offices, the problem is getting worse, with average paper volume growing 25% annually. The cost can be staggering--and it's not just the cost of storage. For example, filing or retrieving a single document can cost as much as $20 in labor. Finding a misfiled document costs an average of $125 in labor. Recreating a lost document (it's estimated that 7.5% of all paper documents get lost) costs an average of $350 in labor. Document management systems may be the answer. Although they may require a considerable investment in computer technology initially, they can reduce these costs in the long term and make your client's or employer's operations more efficient and effective. In addition to eliminating filing cabinets of documents, document management systems have these benefits: * Once an image is stored in such a system, many people can access it immediately and simultaneously, even from remote locations. For example, an old tax return can be retrieved in minutes, rather than hours or days (as would be the case if it was stored off-site). Further, documents can be sent electronically to other computers via modem. * If a document is converted by optical character recognition (OCR) software, it's possible to locate even misfiled material simply by conducting a computer search for key words in the document. * By adding a password to certain files, users can keep certain information confidential--without the need for other kinds of physical security. The document imaging field still is in its infancy. While there are several software packages for converting, indexing, storing and retrieving documents, none of the off-the-shelf systems is flexible enough to meet most users' needs. As a result, systems must be customized for the user's unique operation. Choosing and integrating system components put a heavy burden on users: How, after all, can they select the correct components without first understanding both their organizations' needs and the components? The purpose of this article is to help readers get started. (For more information on how one company applied this technology successfully, see Setting up a Paperless Office, page 77.) BY ANY OTHER NAME The technology used to address the problem goes by several names. The most popular is document imaging. Descriptive names less often used, but worth knowing because consultants and trade literature sometimes use them, are image management and document management systems. Basically, they're all the same thing--automated systems for scanning, storing, retrieving and managing paper documents. The technology involves the use of a scanner, which electronically converts an image on a page into tiny light and dark dots that are then encoded into bits of binary information--in the same format computers use to store data. (The conversion process is similar to what a fax machine does before transmitting a document over telephone lines.) The original can be a handwritten or typed document, a photograph, a drawing, a flowchart, a computer printout, an invoice, a tax return, an X-ray, even a fingerprint. The converted image then is stored, either on a computer's hard disk or, more likely because of the huge amount of disk space required, on optical disks--the computer data-storage equivalent of CD-ROMs. If the document contains typed text or numbers, the data can be processed one step further by OCR software--making the data much easier to handle. OCR software converts the images of the letters and numbers directly into a word-processorcompatible language, allowing the user to create multiple search indexes for each document--a major advantage that will be explained later in this article--and to edit or reformat the document with word processing software. …