Hardware for a Paperless Business?

Wescotte asks: "While the priority of moving paperless at my company is very low I've made it my personal mission to get rid of as much paper as I can. Creating a basic electronic form and approval system for our internal documents is a big job but I feel the largest hurdle will be creating a system in which the average employee can scan in additional documents to attach to these forms. For example am employee scanning in all receipts to attach to an expense report. Ideally I would like to find a piece of hardware that allows for print/copy/scan, and would allow for some personal identification by swiping our employee id card or even finger print identification. Does such a product exist and nearly compete price wise with the Xerox products?" Is anyone aware of a system or hardware additions that could streamline this process, and provide centralized document storage for document scans? "We currently have quite a few Xerox DocuCentre devices, located all over the building, that are accessible by all employees and most have the ability to scan to TIFF/PDF. Personal gripes about little software glitches in the scanning process aside, the real problem is putting these image scans into a central location yet easily identifiable by the employee after the scan.

Our Xerox machines allow us to create templates on each machine. This allows the user to select the destination of where the image should be stored. It would be ideal to store a template per employee so they would have their own folder of stored images. However, maintaining such a list would be far too large of an undertaking since each individual machine would have to have it's own list. Plus, navigating by employee name would be a chore because of the size of the company."

Comments

Here you go...

[Anonymous Coward]

This system is similar to the Xerox while offering what you want. You combine the Canon with this desktop software to manage the scanning and this makes it all searchable and stuff. Talk to your Canon rep about a card reader for access control and you're done.

Good luck.

Re:Going at this from the wrong angle

[anthony_dipierro]

If I remember right (and I'm not a tax accountant, so go talk to yours), I think that receipts under $75 are no longer required in an audit. I don't know about your company, but in most companies this means that 50%-75% of receipts don't need to be kept.

It's really an issue of materiality. If you're a multi-million dollar software company, then you probably don't need to keep a receipt every time you buy a dozen bagels (although you might have to if you buy a dozen bagels every day). If you're a tiny one-man operation, then maybe you do need to keep records for these expenses (a company which has no evidence for 50-75% of its purchases isn't likely to do well in an audit). Then again, a tiny one-man operation probably isn't going to face an audit in the first place.

If I remember right, Amex will give you copies of everything at year-end that you just stuff in a folder.

Unless it's a cash transaction, the receipt is often superfluous anyway. Even with cash transactions keeping good records is more important than keeping receipts. If your company faces an audit and you hand the auditor a box of receipts, you're probably not going to do very well. On the other hand, if you hand over a file with well kept double-entry books, bank and credit card statements which reconcile to those books, and only a few receipts for some big ticket purchases, you'll probably do fine (unless of course you really were doing something illegal).

It really depends on what you're doing, there are no black and white answers. Record-keeping laws don't require a company to spend millions of dollars recording every penny (a few financial companies like banks aside). The concept is materiality, which has both quantitative and qualitative aspects, and can only truly be determined in the context of the situation.