The paperless office has been often heard about yet seldom seen. Truth is the vast majority of businesses have nearly all of their information laying on desks and filed away in cabinets. This creates a host of problems for businesses, problems that can easily be solved by converting paper documents into a digital format.

Often times, when businesses make the decision to “go digital,” they seek help from a professional document scanning service to transfer paper records into electronic copies. The electronic copies are then available to anyone with access to the document database. Any document can be quickly found using keywords.

In 2002 and 2003 respectively the Federal Government has encourage the paperless office.

• In  2002 the federal government introduced the introduced the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires businesses to properly maintain financial records. That includes being able to retrieve them when required. This is significantly easier when the documents are stored electronically.
• In 2003, Congress passed the Fair and Accurate Credit Reporting Act (FACTA) which also requires business to properly safeguard and store personal information of employees and customers and properly destroy it.  Obviously if documents are systematically converted to a digital format, it is easier to store, retrieve, and ultimately destroy this sensitive information.
• The third major act which compels companies to store information electronically is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, which addresses the security and privacy of health data. The standards are meant to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the nation’s health care system by encouraging the widespread use of electronic data in the US health care system.

Most offices operate under a flood of paper documents. Employees maintain a personal archive, each office maintains another archive and then there is also an official company archive. The storage required for paper documents grows at a rate of 20-25% every year. To help meet their storage needs many companies look to off-site storage companies to store their company documents. This solves the storage problem but can be very costly depending on the size of the business.