This blog is for small and medium sized business owners looking to save time and money by organizing your office files, receipts and other paper records in the cloud. I recently started a new business and that gave me the opportunity to leverage the cloud and be completely paperless from day one.One of the first steps was to decide what the business would use for basic email, collaborative document authoring and shared calendars. The choice we made was Google. Primarily because the solution is easy to use, affordable and provides a comprehensive list of additional services in the applications marketplace. We still use Outlook for an email and calendar client and most users also have the full Office suite loaded on their workstations.  For me the only drawback is the lack of support for Google Calendar Sync and Google Cloud Connect when I am using my MacBook Air.

The next step was to eradicate incoming paper from the post office mail and receipts from expenses. In addition it is still a business requirement to physically sign some contracts with an actual pen and ink. We needed to scan those records for emailing and storing copies in the cloud.  So I began evaluating desktop scanners. I wanted a compact unit that was easy to use but flexible enough to handle different sizes of paper. Scanning speed was not a big consideration but I definitely knew I wanted a document feeder and not a flatbed. I thought about using an all-in-one printer but quite frankly the scan quality and the software that comes with those devices is not as good as a dedicated peripheral. The manufacturers of those devices are focused on the printing aspect of the device and selling ink. I needed a scanner that would create flawless images, perform on the fly OCR and easily connect with GoogleDocs for storing and sharing the files we needed to convert from paper to searchable PDF.