This year we have made a lot of progress at Stewart Design in our efforts to create the paperless office. We have been very pleased with the results. The benefits we have seen are:

• Saving on paper, ink cartridges, toner
• Reduced utilities and maintenance
• Saving on stationery and postage
• Canceled fax line
• Greater efficiency
• Environmentally friendly

Once we put our minds to it, it wasn’t really that hard. The greatest issue was overcoming the mental hurdle of not having anything to touch and my innate accountant’s desire (no, I didn’t mean inane) to hoard every document that ever has the misfortune to come into my possession. The reality is that I now have greater control and ease of finding documents. No more “where’s that invoice?" How many times have you gone looking for some document only to discover that it’s not where it should be? Someone else has it, or it got misfiled or lost. Almost all our documents are in electronic format – thank you PDF!

Here is how we accomplished this:

We signed up for electronic invoices and statements from every bank, vendor, credit card company, utility company, etc that offers that; and almost all do. They either deliver the document via e-mail in a PDF attachment, or you have the ability to download the document (statement, invoice, etc) from their website. The key is to have everything organized on your computer. I have folders for Bank Statements, Credit Card Statements, each vendor, and miscellaneous organizations we deal with, like the IRS and state for all those fun returns we have to file. I have a consistent file naming system. For example our American Express statements are saved in a folder called Financial\Amex Statements\2008\ like this:

Amex – May 2008
Amex – Jun 2008
etc,

You can group everything by year or vendor, the choice is yours. There is no right or wrong way; just whatever you are most comfortable with. The only thing you must do is be consistent.

On the outgoing side we create all Stewart Design invoices electronically, and e-mail them to clients as a PDF attachment. We do the same with statements.

We pay all bills online where possible. We write very few checks.

We signed up with an online fax service, Packetel and receive all faxes via e-mail as PDF files. Also, we were able to drop our fax line, thus saving more money.

We e-mail documents, rather than fax them.

The net result – We have spent nothing, yep $0, this year on paper, ink, toner and office supplies. Actually I lied; we have a negative cost this year. We returned some ink cartridges we bought last year and were never going to use for a refund. Plus, I am not going to have to physically archive old documents every year. You know, that fun process that you go through every January, putting the oldest documents into storage boxes, to free up space for this year’s documents. And; I don’t have to find somewhere to store those boxes – that out of the way place where they are, well, out of the way, but not so out of the way that you can’t find them when the IRS comes calling, or someone asks for a copy of that old invoice from dear knows when.

The other great thing is that I can now work from anywhere. All I need is my laptop and an internet connection, and I’m ready to go.

- David McClure