The paperless office, one stack at a time
Offices do not go paperless by decree. They go paperless when the morning mail stops landing on a desk. A six-step plan, the daily procedure, and a property management office that did it in a month.
Ademero Team6 min read
Most paperless projects stall in the same place: the backfile gets scanned, everyone celebrates, and six months later there is a new pile of paper on every desk because nobody changed what happens to the mail. This guide is for the office manager who has to make it stick. It covers a six-step plan, the daily procedure that does the real work, and one office that followed it.
The six steps
- Count the paper for one week. Put a tally sheet by the mail tray and the printer. Note what arrives, what gets printed and why, and the ten forms people touch most. You will find that a handful of document types make up most of the pile.
- Decide where documents will live. One place, with search, permissions and a retention period per document type. That can be a system like Content Central, in the cloud or on your own servers; for a very small office, well-organized SharePoint or Google Drive folders can be enough to start.
- Fix the incoming paper first, the backfile second. New paper arrives every day. Old boxes can wait. Get the daily procedure below running before you open a single archive box.
- Redraw the busiest paper process. Usually supplier invoices or a sign-off form. Replace walking a page to a desk with routing, and a wet signature with an electronic one where your rules allow.
- Remove the paper habits. Fewer printers, no new filing cabinets, a shred bin next to the scanner, and a written rule that the scanned copy is the record.
- Then scan the backfile in batches. Newest years first, because those are the files people still ask for. Destroy originals only when the scans have been checked and your retention policy allows it.
The procedure that keeps paper out: morning mail
Write this down, post it next to the scanner, and give it one owner and one backup.
| Time | Step | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| 9:00 | Open and sort out | Pull out junk mail, checks and anything that must stay paper, such as originals a court or lender requires. Everything else goes in one stack. |
| 9:15 | Prepare | Staples and sticky notes off, pages facing the same way. |
| 9:20 | Scan the whole stack | 300 dpi, both sides. Capture software splits it into separate documents, works out what each one is and names the files. |
| 9:30 | Check the flagged ones | Look only at documents the software is unsure of, and confirm or fix them. |
| 9:40 | Send and shred | Files go to each department’s folder or workflow. The paper goes into a dated box, kept for a short, set period, then shredded. |
For the settings and checks behind each step:
Worked example: a property management office
A 12-person office manages about 400 rental units. Every day brings lease applications, signed leases and renewals, vendor invoices, maintenance work orders, insurance certificates from vendors, and notices from the city. Before the project, each type lived in a different cabinet and the leasing team kept their own copies.
Week 1: count and decide
The tally showed six document types made up nearly the whole pile. They chose a folder structure on SharePoint by property and unit, with one rule for file names: Unit, document type, date, for example Unit 14B, Lease Renewal, 2026-09-01.pdf.
Week 2: set up capture
They installed CapturePoint 6 on the PC beside the scanner and pointed it at a folder holding a few examples of each of the six document types. It set up the job from those samples: the types, the fields to read (unit number, tenant or vendor name, date, amount on invoices) and the naming rule. The first real mail batch had a handful of documents flagged for review, each with the reason shown, such as a unit number it could not read on a faxed work order.
Week 3: change the routine
The office manager ran the morning-mail procedure daily. Finished files went to SharePoint by property and unit, and vendor invoices also went to the bookkeeper’s folder. Two filing cabinets were emptied into dated shred boxes.
Week 4: the backfile, newest first
Current tenants’ lease files went through in evening batches, one property at a time. Each batch was checked against the paper before the box was marked for shredding under their retention policy. Older closed files were left in storage for later.
What changed: a leasing agent asked for a tenant’s renewal while on site at the property and had it on her phone from SharePoint in under a minute, instead of calling the office to dig through a cabinet. That is the moment people stop printing.
The policy, on one page
- Digital first: new documents are created and shared digitally; paper only where a rule or a counterparty requires it.
- The scan is the record: once checked, the scanned copy is the official copy.
- Naming: one convention, written down. Our file naming convention template is a starting point.
- Retention: how long each document type is kept, and how paper and files are destroyed. Start from the records retention policy template.
- Access: who can open, change and delete each type.
- Exceptions: what stays on paper, who holds it, and for how long.
What gets in the way
- “I like to print it to read it.” Fine, then it goes in the shred bin. The record is the scan.
- Outsiders who send paper. You cannot stop them, which is exactly why the morning-mail procedure matters more than the backfile.
- Signatures. Use electronic signatures where your rules allow; keep a short list of documents that still need wet ink.
- The one person who knows the cabinets. Make them the owner of the new structure, not its victim.
How to tell it is working
- The mail tray is empty by 10 a.m.
- Pages printed per month are falling.
- Nobody has opened a filing cabinet for a current document in a month.
- Time to find a document is a search, not a walk.
For the bigger picture of which Ademero product does what, see our paperless office page.
