Top 5 great tools to have for a paperless office!

While many are in the rush to turn their offices from physical to virtual, there are some of us who may still be bound by an office with a real address. But in order to make the most of your office, the best way is to go paperless. Here are some tools you should use not only to digitize your documents but also make them easily searchable and available when you need them.

[This tools may be more suitable to tech oriented offices, but may be useful to others as well]

Freshbooks

As an invoicing solution, Freshbooks an extremely popular web based software used by small businesses and freelancing agencies to generate automatic invoices. All you need to do is access your billing on Freshbooks with your login and password. You can also use Freshbooks to generate reports and track your expenses and costs.

Invoices are sent securely and clients can choose to pay the bills through PayPal, Verisign and other payment gateways. Now you can forget about painful tracking your company’s work hours, bookkeeping and sending projects estimates and quotes to clients. Let Freshbooks do it for you, the paperless way.

To get Freshbooks, click here.

CardMunch

Did you ever imagine a few years back that your card holders and folders are going to go into trash? If you’re armed with this super app from LinkedIn, visiting cards for you are going to become history. CardMunch allows you to take pictures of visiting cards from your phone. It converts the information from the visiting card and feeds it into the memory of your contact list.

Once CardMunch had loaded a new contact on your phone, you can sync up with them on LinkedIn in just one touch. What’s more, you’ll also be able to see your common connections with a contact while you’re on the go. And yes, don’t forget to chuck that visiting card in the bin.

If your phone does not support Cardmunch, you can search on the web for similar software for your Phone OS – They surely are incredibly useful!

To get CardMunch, click here.

Shoeboxed

Are you sick and tired of keeping a record of all your receipts, vouchers and invoices that you have to send back to the head office for re-imbursement? Are all the small chits, casual notes and folders of vendor slips causing your office to look like a paper jungle? Then Shoeboxed is an answer to your worries.

Once scanned into the system, your receipts, business cards and miscellaneous data will get indexed into the Shoeboxed system, allowing you to generate expense reports and integrate them into your Gmail or Microsoft Office applications. Additionally, Shoeboxed is of great help when you file your tax returns online or when you want visiting cards to be directly exported to your CRM.

To get Shoeboxed, click here.

Basecamp

Are you managing a project which has over a hundred variables, mobile team members and fluctuating resources? If this is the case, how many scans and print outs are you going to manually manage? With Basecamp, you can simultaneously obtain an overview of all the projects alongside the details of one particular project. From pulling out specific emails, getting an overview of deadlines to meet, tracking specific project milestone, centralizing client discussions, working with multiple languages and much more, Basecamp will prove to be a useful tool not only to get towards a paperless office but also an uncluttered hard disk! Take a free trial before signing up for the paid version for features.

To get Basecamp, click here.

Lifelock

Here is an application that will literally help you cut down on the volume of paper in your office. If you are harrowed with unwanted catalogs, mailers, newsletters and promotional letter in your post, choose Lifelock to get rid of it all. Lifelock will ensure that you are removed from every unwanted subscription and mailing list, thus protecting you from identity theft.

In addition to credit fraud, Lifelock will help you detect when your identity is being misused by wireless services, utility companies, bank loan departments and other third parties that fall in Lifelock’s network.

To get Lifelock, click here.

Do you have any other tools that you use to make your office paperless? Share it with us!