If you’re planning to go paperless, it’s important to have a timeframe for making the leap. “Paperless in 90 days” is a great achievable goal for many organizations and provides a rallying cry to get your team on the same page. Setting a goal of achieving the paperless office in less than 90 days also gives you a quarterly target to address and hit while helping to maintain momentum. And the sooner you reach that deadline, the sooner you start enjoying the benefits of going paperless.

Do you become buried underneath of a mountain of paperwork every time you walk into your office? The good news about this is that it may not be because your team is flooded with too much work. Instead, there is a good chance that you feel overwhelmed by the paperwork in your office, because there is simply too much paper; there are multiple document solutions that can help you resolve this problem. Here are five steps that you can take right now to significantly reduce the amount of paper in your office.

Your company needs to start using electronic documents right now. This type of document is less expensive, more environmentally friendly and more efficient than its physical alternatives. The key to making the switch from physical documents to digital ones is your team. Your employees are the ones who will be using your newly digitized documents, so it's imperative that you prepare them for this change. To this end, you cannot assume that your employees will effectively adapt to electronic document management. You must make this happen. Here is how:

No matter what type of business you run, you rely on documents to help you run your company. The more effectively you are able to manage this paper, the smoother your business will run. That is why you need good paper management software. The best paper management software will save you hundreds of man hours - per employee - and make handling your documents easy.

How you store your documents matters. Storing your company’s documents in a centralized document repository is a smart idea. It ensures that all of your documents are stored in a secured location, and that you won’t have to worry about any stray data ending up in the wrong place. It will also increase the overall efficiency of your document storage by making it easier to find documents and reducing the storage space needed to save everything (multiple storage solutions waste space, because many of them won’t be filled up).

Technological advances in recent years have enabled businesses all over the world to enjoy the many benefits of highly efficient document management software. These powerful systems enable businesses in nearly every industry to optimize performance, cut costs, save valuable space and enhance security. But you need to find the best document management software to make the most of these benefits.

In 1978, Frederick Wilfrid Lancaster predicted that society would one day be entirely paperless. In those days, he had to rely on document archiving systems that were decidedly clumsy, and even he was convinced there was a better way to handle paper documents. In today's day and age, the choice for your document archiving system is torn between digital and paper.

For years, businesses have been told that a paperless office is truly the way of the future. However, during day to day business operations you likely still use paper documents as a way to keep information moving and within your line of sight. This forces one to think, will paper documents ever truly be a thing of the past? Or, are we destined to keep paper documents floating around the office regardless of the technology that comes our way?

Electronic records management has come a long way since the advent of the computer. While being able to store and access documents on a computer was a huge advancement for document management, recent years have seen an incredible explosion in technologies that directly impact how document management works. Today’s document management systems are highly efficient and powerful, resulting in increased productivity, less wasted time and great cost savings for businesses in nearly any industry.