The 'less-paper office' - an accountant's eye view
Susan Reid, director of accountancy firm Garbutt-Elliott discusses the reality of condensing the paper mountain into a single server.
The paperless office is an old myth that reappears periodically to haunt IT directors. For all the hype it has received, I believe that the paperless office is not even desirable for a 21st century accounting practice. There are some processes that just work better on paper.
Instead I would make the case for the "less paper" office, a term we use regularly at Garbutt-Elliott.
Continued...
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Librarian
I have to say the concept of "Less Paper" has got to be right and in the series of articles I put together for the IT Faculty we also used this idea - although we called it "paperLESS".
The one thing I do notice is that both Foxley Kingham and Garbett & Elliott seem to have possibily missed an opportunity to use the skill sets of a Librarian to catalogue and store in the most efficent manner. It could perhaps add to the efficiency?
Getting there.
I am a sole practitioner running a very small mixed practice. We went paperless on accounts production last year, since when not one file has been added to the store. Eventually we will be able to dispose of those files in store.
We have been a CaseWare user since about 1998. CaseWare has always allowed for paperless working papers, but we just never took the plunge. About a year ago we decided to no longer print working paper files and this actually improved our record keeping and working paper files. Prior to paperless working whether to photocopy client working papers was always a balance between the cost and any possible benefits. Now we scan items that before we would not copy and store them in the working paper file.
CaseWare holds the data by client by year and each year has a document index which allows you to add any document type, give it a sensible filename and description.
The best thing we did, which has made this method of working really work well, was installing dual monitors. We can have the current file open on one monitor and the prior year on the other monitor.
My next project is working out ho to make the tax files paperless using IRIS.