Josh Zerkel, a Professional Organizer with Custom Living Solutions in San Francisco, recently made a series of how-to videos explaining how small businesses can use tools to go paperless. Here is a video where Josh talks about different productivity boosting tools.
The Professional Organizers over at Living Peace, a Massachusetts based organizing service, has some great tips on creating a functional, comfortable and beautiful (and organized!) home office. The video is embedded below, and visit their blog for other useful tips.
In this video, Josh Zerkel, a Professional Organizer in San Francisco and founder of Custom Living Solutions, has a checklist for what to look for in a paperless solution.
Josh mentions the need for the paperless solution to fit into your current workflow, ease of use, that it should work for both paper and digital documents, and should include optical character recognition.
He also suggests that labeling/categorization of files should be simple, search is important, sharing, backup and anywhere access are other important attributes.
Check out the video on what to look for when picking a paperless solution and building your digital office:
At OfficeDrop, we’ve noticed more and more visitors coming to our site who’ve searched for the word “cloud.” But since the cloud has so many meanings to so many people, we’d thought we’d explain how we see small businesses taking advantage of the power of cloud computing to get more out of their paper and digital documents. Our understanding of how businesses use the cloud is rapidly evolving as we grow!
Connecting Cloud Services
More and more, we are seeing the benefits of the cloud in terms of connecting data to other services. Paper no longer has to be stuck in a silo’ed document management service, but can instead be accessed and shared with other software via a cloud filing cabinet. Data can be pushed from one place into another to take advantage of unique technologies – like Evernote’s amazing mobile clients or FreshBooks’ unique invoicing software. (OfficeDrop has recently released an API to allow other software developers to build off of our document scanning service and digital filing system/digital office.) Cloud content management makes this all possible.
Cloud computing is great for small businesses for a number of reasons. As we mentioned in our blog post, “An Introduction to Cloud Computing for Small Business Owners:”
“Cloud computing is a platform for accessing and utilizing your businesses IT via the internet. This means nearly all of your IT resources – your servers, data storage, software/ programs – are hosted on the internet. It used to be that all of your computing would have to be done by your own servers, hardwired to your business. Now that the internet is around, your servers don’t have to be hardwired, and you don’t even need to have your own. Instead, you can rent server space from anywhere in the country from people like Amazon, who have already paid the overhead. Utilizing this system with SaaS, which does the same thing with software, one could theoretically run an entire business from various cyber cafés (if those still exist) without purchasing any of their own personal hardware or software at all.”
OfficeDrop continues to learn more and more about how small business owners want to interact with the cloud (and their data!) When we first founded the company 3 years ago (wow, that’s a long time) we thought that web browsers would be the favorite way for users to access their data. But we were wrong. With the success of our downloadable apps, we’ve noticed something pretty amazing: Business owners like to use applications to visit the cloud, not browsers.
As our cloud scanning software app, ScanDrop, continues to take off and since our iPad “paper to go” app was in the top 10 business ipad applications in itunes, we’ve realized that apps are a great way to interact with the cloud.
OfficeDrop Free App Downloads
And by “realized” we mean that our customers made it clear that they like apps!
Our CEO, Prasad, has been busy training some of our web developers in desktop programming, and our CTO, Vik, has dusted off his Objective-C skills for our Mac versions.
We will have a new way to interact with our cloud digital filing service from the desktop soon for Windows users. And Mac users will soon be able to scan to the cloud just like their PC friends.
We are also busy working on creating workflow specific desktop/cloud solutions for paper intensive industries, starting with accountants and bookkeepers. We just did the first demonstration of our new bookkeeping software, which was very well received, and hope to enroll beta users toward the end of the month. This software will connect the popular QuickBooks software with paper in a number of powerful ways: from the scanner, desktop and cloud. Let us know if you are interested in trying this service!
We are having a ton of fun here at OfficeDrop, helping business owners harness the power of cloud computing. Of course, we haven’t forgotten the importance of actually speaking with customers. Give us a call at 888-674-6493 if you ever want to chat about getting your paper and filing cabinets into the cloud!
These days, there are a number of different way to go paperless. Of course, OfficeDrop is one of them, but in this video, Josh Zerkel, a Professional Organizer in San Francisco and founder of Custom Living Solutions, outlines the different options you have when going paperless.
Josh outlines the different types of scanner available, the power of OCR, online backup, text-search, different online applications and mail-in scanning services.
OfficeDrop has teamed up with Professional Organizer, Josh Zerkel, to guide you to a more productive, less paper, digital office. On July 15th we showed you the benefits of going paperless, and where you can get started in the first webinar, Saving Time and Money with your Paperless Office. Now it’s time to take the next step, and learn about the specific tools you can use in webinar 2, Online and Offline Tools to Master Your Paperless Office.
Like the last one, this webinar is free, so all you have to do is register here. It’s kicking off on July 29th at 11am PST so hurry and get those registrations in. This is a great opportunity to learn about specific tools that will help you reduce paper, become more efficient, and lower costs.
Also, if you want to see the video from the first webinar you can visit our Digital Office page – the video is on the right!
A current user of ours recently sent an intriguing article about kid’s school documents, so we though’t we would share it with you here on our blog.
There are a lot of different ways paper infiltrates your home or office. The obvious culprits are bills, receipts, pamphlets, flyers, etc. In the article linked above, a woman tracks the influx of paper from a less suspected source, our children.
If you have kids in school, I’m sure you’ve noticed the piles of handouts, assignments, permission slips, worksheets, outlines, and syllabi that they pack up and deliver from class to your home. They seem so innocent, I know, but as a Southborough mother found out earlier this month, these kids are packing thousands of pages throughout one school year.
For the parent trying to reduce paper clutter, your own kids could be your biggest problem – dumping Spiderman backpack-loads of paper on the kitchen counter five days of the week. I remember back in middle school there was at least one handout every class and college wasn’t much better. At least a college student has a dorm to dump paper in, but middle and high schoolers probably don’t have their own filing cabinets in their rooms and so the paper inevitably ends up cluttering your home. It’s not their fault, schools simply distribute paper at an alarmingly unchecked rate.
Kids’ paper flow is essentially the same as the influx of bills and invoices, it’s just delivered on shorter legs. Therefore, document scanning can be just as effective for kid’s documents as it is for mom and dad’s.
With OfficeDrop’s monthly scanning service, the kids can dump their paper directly into an OfficeDrop Scanvelope to be sent off for scanning before pages even hit the kitchen table. If you asked for it to be shredded, you won’t have to see those pages ever again, left to organize and delete the unwanted pages from our convenient online filing system.
Yep, it’s OfficeDrop. Check out our recent feature on Fox 43′s Hampton Roads Show on the episode outlining how to “Tackle paper clutter…with a computer!”
In the video featured below, organizer Amy Volk talks OfficeDrop and even flaunts one of our Scanvelopes. In first few minutes she reviews Neat Receipts scanners and then does a great job describing the benefits of OfficeDrop and comparing the Neat Receipts service to OfficeDrop. (OfficeDrop comes in at minute 3:00)
Thanks, Amy for talking us up and letting us know about the segment!
To see more organization tips from Amy Volk, see her website, Simplified Living.
Scoring in the World Cup is no easy feat. Players are up against the best of the best, so to get those goals they need to be skilled and organized.
We can’t help you with your soccer skills, but we can help you with your office organization. Going paperless is a great way to meet your organization goals, but as with the world’s most popular sport, you can’t just start taking pot shots and expect those goals to be met. Here are some tips for meeting your organization goals and winning the paperless game.
When you set goals for getting organized or going paperless, be realistic. A goal like “eliminate all my paper in one week” is probably too ambitious for most. To start, pick one document store to organize, like a single filing cabinet. Developing an effective method on a small scale will build confidence, and get you ready for the big game.
If you’re ever going to meet your organization goals, you need an attack plan. Decide exactly how you want to organize, how much paper you want to eliminate, and a timeline for your plan before you start scanning documents. That way, you have a strategy to put you in scoring position.
Once you’ve developed your organizational protocols, keep it up! It’s easy to slip back into old habits while your paper starts to pile up again and you become less organized. Don’t let all your hard work go to waste. Once you’ve met your goal you have to play defense to keep your lead against paper.
As always, look to OfficeDrop for any coaching tips when it comes to document scanning and organization. Shoot your documents to us in the mail and we’ll give you the assist to hitting all of your paperless and organizational goals.
OfficeDrop is teaming up with organizational mastermind, Josh Zerkel, to bring you two free webinars to teach you how to go paperless and keep all of your documents organized. For seven years Josh’s company, Custom Living Solutions, has been helping people optimize their workspaces so that they can lower stress, be more effective, and minimize costs.
With this single registration, you’re signed up to benefit from these two informative webinars:
In this webinar we outline the many benefits of the paperless office and tell you how to get started.
In the second webinar, we let you know how to get the most out of your paperless office, how to maintain low paper volume, and offer helpful tools to make everything easier.
If you manage a small business or home office, don’t pass up on this opportunity to learn everything you need to know about reducing paper and staying organized. Registration only takes a moment, so we hope you take that moment and that you join us July 15th and 29th.
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