5 Tools you need to go Paperless in Your Office or Business.

OFFICE EQUIPMENT YOU'LL NEED TO GO PAPERLESS

The main products you'll need to go paperless in your office are the following:

1.) Adobe Acrobat Professional: Estimated Cost: $400-$500 (see #2)

Adobe Acrobat Professional

is an indispensable program for storing, creating, and transferring documents. It is also great for automating forms. Say for instance, that you are a tax attorney running a big law firm. Instead of having a stable of paralegals working at $30/hour filling out the same forms, checking the same boxes and such, you can set up an automated document which will go ahead and automatically populate all the documents you need. You will still have to obviously type in the original information such as your name, address, and other information as well as that of your clients. However, once you get it all set up, this is a very powerful program. This is arguably the most powerful piece of software in the world, when used properly.

2.) Sheet Fed Scanner. Estimated cost: $400-$500 (Includes a copy of Adobe Acrobat Professional free of charge, which is a $400-$500 value) There are not really that many decent compact sheet fed scanners on the market. But the one that stands out is the Fujitsu Scansnap Scanner. All the rave reviews you've heard about is all true, and then some.

This scanner is about the size of a small toaster and scans papers like a racehorse. It is not perfect, however, in that sometimes some pages get jammed in there. However, you will find that problem with all scanners and even those $10,000 massive copiers you get on lease.

It is extremely easy to use. You don't have to worry about powering it up, booting up and whatnot. It is always ready to go and you don't have to worry about setting up or opening any programs every time you use it. You cannot say enough about this device if you've had experience with other scanners and programs. And the price couldn't be better. Since it comes with a free copy of Adobe Acrobat Professional, the scanner pretty much pays for itself since the retail price of the software itself is about the same as the scanner. In fact, many people purchase the scanner from Fujitsu, and then turn around and sell the scanner and the software on Ebay and make some pretty good coin. That tells you what kind of amazing value you'll be getting.

3.) Cross-Cut Shredder. The idea is really to go paper-less, not completely paperless. You will, of course, no doubt be working with paper. However, rather than taking up hundreds of square feet in your office building, you'd be better off just shredding your hard copies and store them on your computer. Which brings us to our next product:

4.) External Hard Drive. Forget about those online services promising to store your information off-line. They are a ripoff. You'd be better to just buy up a bunch of hard drives, keep one at home, one in a bank deposit box, one at the office (you might want to lock it up somehow for security purposes) We recommend using a solid state hard drive instead of the hard drives with fans. We have not had a good experience with Western Digital hard drives. From our experience, over 50% of Western Digital Hard Drives crash and burn and die. So we recommend the iomega hard drives. Iomega comes out with a ruggedized version which can withstand a truck running over it and you can potentially drop it from about 15 feet in the air and it will be ok. We've never done the testing ourselves, but there is an online video by Popular Mechanics Magazine where they have their video tests of those ruggedized hard drives. And whatever you do, please purchase several hard drives, because you never know what can happen to your data.

5.) Email Fax. (Estimated Cost:$10/month) Unfortunately, even though most people are still using those stone age fax machines, you will just have to accept the fact that fax machines are here to stay, no matter how ridiculous they are. You will still have many, many clients, vendors, etc. who will insist on sending you a bunch of faxes, and they will ask, expect and demand you to do so likewise. For this reason, we recommend the Email Fax services. They are extraordinarily effective and they save on paper as well.

These services are great because the way they work is that you will get your own dedicated fax phone number. And as someone sends you a fax, it will arrive in your email and you just download it from there. Not at your office to view your fax? No problem. You can easily view the fax from your iPhone. And then you can forward it to whoever you want. And probably the best part of it is that you do not have to redundantly file it away in a cabinet or scan it back into your computer. All you have to do is re-name the file and save it to the appropriate place on your computer.

Sending faxes are quite easy too. For instance, say you want to send a fax to Irene. You just go into your email, make a new email, upload the pdf, to your email, and send it to (example): 18001289516@emailfax.com. Press send and you're good to go. The quality of the images is pretty good too.

Best of all is the price. They are usually around $10/month. Also, you can save around $200-$300 on the device as well as ink and paper. If you have a dedicated fax line at your office, you can probably spend upwards of $30-$40/month, not including long-distance charges as well. It also has the added benefit in that if you are on the road or on vacation you can access those urgent faxes quickly and easily from your email or your iPhone.