Karen Bodeving's CPA firm has gone to the dogs. The sole practitioner began breeding Saint Bernard dogs 11 years ago in hopes of spending more time with her family outside of her Oregon office. Today, she and her husband travel the world showing some of the dozen puppies they raise on 40 acres outside Grants Pass-even during tax season.
She's not Superwoman. She just made the choice to mimic what larger accounting firms were doing in terms of going paperless and proved that investing in document management systems could pay off for even a one-woman shop (with some help from her part-time secretary).
Bodeving, a Lacerte user for several years, decided in 2005 that Lacerte Document Management was a "natural step"for moving toward a more electronic system by dropping the roughly 400 returns she handles directly into online file cabinets. It cost her less than $2,000 to get started, but the initial results weren't exactly what she had hoped for.
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"The first year, I was a mess. I had no idea what I was doing," Bodeving confesses. "I was just using it as a filing system, making notes in pencil, then scanning it myself. It was so hard to let go of paper, and I wasn't smart enough to invest in a decent scanner."
The next year, she started doing the same routine, but found her workload snowballing so much by February that she practically needed someone in the office around the clock making photocopies. So she stopped mid-season and purchased a Canon scanner that included Adobe Acrobat 7.0. Within an hour, she made back her money.
Selecting a Scanner
You've made the decision to invest in a document management system. The next step is selecting the scanner that best fits your company's needs.
So many options are out there and the wrong decision can prove counterproductive to any time savings anticipated from going paperless.
Following are some guidelines of what to look for and what to avoid:
Multisheet feeders Determine how many pages it can take at once and whether it can handle different size paper simultaneously, especially important for tax returns that include pay stubs, W-2s and other variously shaped documents that will otherwise need to be photocopied.
Need for speed How many pages does it scan per minute? Thirty to 50 is a decent number for a smaller firm.
Smart scanning Optical character recognition technology can identify forms such as W-2s and 1099s and automatically populate tax applications with that data.
Clean up Cleanup technology, such as Kofax's VirtualReScan (VRS), check to make sure documents are right-side up and drop blank pages.
Resolution Flawless images are important in business presentations, but are not as critical for tax returns. Remember that the higher the resolution, the slower the scan and the more space the file occupies.
Scan operator Train a clerical person as a dedicated scanner instead of using higher-paid partners. Having one person will result in better quality and more consistency. If the scanner is connected to a PC, that operator can view the results before sending documents to system.
Don't go cheap Prices are going down, but don't be penny wise and pound foolish. Some scanners cost as low as $399, but usually don't include some of the more advanced functionality mentioned above. Look at the cost relative to speed. Is it worth a couple hundred dollars more to do X number of extra pages per minute?
Make a deal What happens if you've already invested in scanners and don't want to literally throw away your investment? Some companies will let you trade in your old device for a better model similar to the way automobile dealerships do, as Lexmark does through its channel.
Search for service Much of the hardware cost comes from maintenance costs. Look at lease agreements and at how quickly repairs will take place. For example, Lexmark offers a Next Business Day Guarantee and Advance Exchange, in which it sends the company a loaner before that customer sends its scanner to Lexmark for repair.
Acrobat essentially lets her emulate all the things she was used to doing in a paper environment such as circling numbers, adding checkmarks, stamping items and signing documents, so she doesn't feel like she's letting go of her pencil.
She estimates her second-year savings at about $2,200, including costs for copy paper, files and colored tabs and eliminating a part-time copy person. And she only travels to the office a couple of times each week.
Her biggest challenge now, besides avoiding slobber on her computer, is monitoring her work in progress so things don't fall through the cracks.
"I had stacks and stacks of paper everywhere that looked like there was a huge backlog," she says. "Now I have to remember that the big piles are sitting in my filing system, just not sitting there looking at me."
Bodeving's experience is typical of many firms that take a simple approach to going paperless. But an increasing number of them are starting to realize the benefits of going "less paper"and vendors are responding by offering more affordable systems to businesses with 10 employees or less, starting as low as $399.99 for a five-user Docsvault Small Business pack by Easy Access Data or $365 per user per year by Acct1st, with some even offering free training and support.
