Do you ever feel like you are drowning in paperwork?! Have you ever been away and suddenly realise you need a document that is back home in your filing cabinet (or in that ‘paperwork pile’!!) and it ends up causing delays?

I have found that if our filing is not in order I can’t focus! And if I can’t focus I procrastinate… which wastes time and money! So we decided to take the route to a paperless (or virtually paperless!) business so that ourselves and our team can access documents remotely.

Part 1: Getting rid of the current files… We got all our old paper files (thousands of pages) sent to a company who scanned everything in for us, and send us back a USB with all the scanned versions on (organised into files like they were in the paper files) and they then shredded the originals.

Part 2: Setting up the ongoing system  

There are 3 key elements to this… Step 1: A Virtual Office Step 2: An Online ‘Filing Cabinet’ (aka. a cloud based software where you can store files online) Step 3: A badass Shredder!

 Step 1: Virtual Office Being able to receive mail wherever you are in the world is key to this life! If you don’t have a physical office yourself with a receptionist that can send you mail, then this is a great (and much more cost effective!) alternative.

With a Virtual Office, you get your mail sent directly to a specific office address where there is a receptionist who receives your post daily. You can then add on the service of them opening, scanning in and emailing your post to you! We have a specific post email account that it all gets sent to, and then there is a process for post getting distributed to the right person in the team and electronically saved on the online filing system. This is great because it means you still get your post in ‘real time’ so you can still have things being processed whilst you are away.

Step 2: Online Filing Cabinet All files that are received into the post account are then saved onto your Cloud based system. We use the One Drive. Get a good folder system set up so that you always know where things are saved (and I recommend naming files well too, so that you can also use the search function to find files if needed)

Step 3: Badass Shredder… … to dispose of all the paperwork that you no longer need! We have killed a number of £30-40 quid shredders, they just weren’t up to the task – so invest in your shredder! We upgraded to something more badass recently, and of course Dave found a BARGAIN price on it to. Here’s the details if you want to get in on the life changing shredding action! Up to 100 sheets at auto-feeding through! Living the dream...

https://www.shreddingmachines.co.uk/shredders.asp?id=2764&cat=Fellowes-AutoMax-100M-Shredder

Not sexy stuff this I know… but the RESULTS of having this non-sexy-system working are VERY SEXY I promise! *jets off on holiday*

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