Paperless practice: The second wave
John Stokdyk introduces a series of articles that will draw on the advice of accountants who have forged ahead with successful paperless practice techniques.
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Information management
A timely article. It is refreshing, at last, to be looking at the next stage of development rather than dwelling on the paper/no paper debate which tended to cloud the valuable stuff.
Much like the part played by oil & the internal combustion engine in trasport, paper didn't just add practical difficulty in allowing the free flow of information it had taken on a life of its own and had become an obstacle to progress. In it's defence of course is that, in various forms, it has been around for thousands of years and so was/is not going to vanish overnight.
We are still on the cusp though and, I have to say that, in a way I feel the same way about the full-blown document management systems as I do about paper. The best illustration I suppose is in the practice that has grown up of scanning and tagging/indexing every bit of paper that enters a building rather then reading it and deciding what's best to do with the information it contains. Maybe it just confirms something you already know or is akin to a tephone call, the information from which leads to a tick box being completed.
Such paper is scrap and just continues to act as a hinderance only now someone has digitized it to remain forever taking up e-space, which is fast becoming the environmental elephant in the data centre.
Scanning incoming post
Paul, I think you may be being a bit unfair. Many of those doing the scanning of incoming post are members of the admin team. They are perhaps not in a position of either knowledge or authority to decide what is, and what is not, appropriate to be scanned. Many Partners in my experience err on the side of caution and instruct most documents (except perhaps obvious marketing literature) to be scanned as a matter of course.
Hi Derek
Most practice within an office tends to be determined by the partners not the admin team and so it's not being unfair on the admin team to say the methods are inefficient.
The admin team scan everthing that comes in, presumably they might tag some of it that's obvious, say to a client, but much they might not and so is, presumably, held untagged. The partners then go through it all deciding what has to be tagged and to where and presumably wishing some could have been chucked. I'm only going on what others have told me in that short story but surely wouldn't it make sense for the partners to see the post, chuck out what's not needed then say what should happen to everything else, before it's scanned?
a very good post indeed!
charles feel free to call me or mail me 07545431478 carl.chambers@lindenhouse.co.uk
i work with accountants going paperless and fully integrate to all of the Practe management solutions to give the added benefit.
We work closley with 2020 and can offer help / advice if required
many thanks