Moving to a paperless office - What equipment to buy?

[jbischke]

I've been inspired by this post and other reading to move to a paper-less office. Basically my plan is to scan all documents I have as PDF files and store them on my computer (backed up of course). I can always print them again if need be but this way I have documents that are more organized, searchable and don't take up as much space at my apartment.

I'm wondering what equipment would be best for this. This article above recommends the Fujitsu ScanSnap and while it looks cool, it's pretty expensive (over $400) and I think it just does scanning, not printing or copying. Ideally I'd like to have something that can do multi-page scanning (don't want to have to scan pages one at a time) and automatically convert them to a PDF. And I'd like that device to be a printer and copier as well. Any recommendations?

Also, would love to hear experiences from anyone else who has gone paperless. I'm pretty excited about the possibility of doing so.

[cdn2wheeler]

You don't actually have to the capital outlay and do all the scanning and whatnot yourself. There are firms that have all the gear that do this stuff as their business.

As well, bear in mind that most business documentation - invoices, bills and whatnot - need to be kept as a hard copy for tax and legal purposes for a prescribed period of time. I think it's 7 years, but that may be dependent on the jurisdiction.

It's been my experience that the "paperless office" is far from paperless. Everyone figures they need a printout of that email, or a hard copy of that web page... *yeesh*

[jbischke]

Thanks for the feedback. In terms of legality I'm going to look into that. I've actually heard that the IRS and others have relaxed this a bit. Since you have a digital copy you can always make a print-out and that seems to suffice in most cases.

As for paperless I think you're right. There are always times when having hard copies is handy. However, I guess I'm looking to do that on more of a JIT basis. Everything is digitally archiving and stuff only is in paper form when I need it. Plus, the bonus of having everything searchable is really, really cool.