Improving workflow — for many people it’s something between a dream and a nightmare. The very words conjure up visions of lost IT time, messy upgrades and lots of training. That might be fine in a big company, but not for smaller businesses, right?

Not necessarily.

Most companies know that they have to move at some point from paper to digital, that the long-term benefits are real and the risk of falling behind the competition are certain. But how to get started?

The key is that you don’t have to go paperless immediately. We talked with Bill Brikiatis, director of Corporate Marketing at software company eCopy, about how the easy steps small- and mid-size businesses can make to switch to digital document archiving and management:

1. The power of searchable PDF

Most companies create plenty of paperwork, whether for proposals, invoices, spreadsheets, contracts, legal documents or reports. They also need to re-find this information so they can review what they have done, or so they can base the next proposal, contract, or report on an earlier one. The problem, then, becomes where to look. That’s especially the case when you want take a document intended for one client and repurpose it for another.

Many companies have tried scanning the pages to create images, and then indexing them by client ID, invoice number or other information. It’s a time-consuming prospect, and it doesn’t help you when you want to find anything that hasn’t been indexed, such as specific language in a contract or a specific delivery address.

The easiest solution to the problem is scanning to a file format called searchable PDF. This allows you to create industry-standard, universally readable PDF-files, which are small in size and can include such things as signatures, handwritten notes and original fonts, along with searchable text, so that you can enter something like “warranty” and find all documents with that phrase.

The best part is you don’t have to spend time indexing the documents. You need special, but inexpensive, software to create searchable PDFs from scans, software that uses high-quality OCR to create searchable files. To start out, for example, you can get eCopy Desktop for about $200. You can create the files directly from scanned paper documents, a task that can be performed by almost anyone on staff, as it does not require elaborate training or special equipment. The scanning can be done on an office copier or an inexpensive desktop scanner.

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