BREHON chartered accountants has gone almost completely paperless. Sarah Hancock has transformed her operation. She had 10 filing cabinets within her St Martin’s office and 170 archive boxes stored off-site and now uses just two filing cabinets in her office.

Now all completed documents are scanned and kept on the server in the office.

Only work in progress, such as client accounts that need to be completed or signed off by clients and other ongoing tasks is kept in paper form. Once finalised they, too, are scanned in.

Mrs Hancock, who started her business from home in 1995, said she had dreamed of making it a paperless operation from the outset. But 12 years later she had accumulated almost 800,000 sheets of paper. For a small firm, this was a modest archive.

‘When I started out, the scanning technology was there to go paperless but as the business expanded there simply wasn’t the time to do it, and also I didn’t require an expensive document management solution.

‘But with ever-improving technology the time seemed right to do it.’

She said it had dramatically increased the efficiency of her office and the scope for expansion.

Now archived files are available immediately rather than taking 24 hours from storage and the extra space in the office has allowed her to fit in two more staff.

Flex Solutions, which specialises in document scanning, took on the project to scan and computerise the 12-year-old archive and has the contract to keep the database up to date.

The computerised system users Adobe and Optical Character Recognition software. Once all client files are scanned and linked together, a highly efficient search facility can be used to quickly retrieve information.

‘With the old system, once an archive box was delivered we used to have to manually search through the file but now we can bring up what we need on screen in seconds.’

Flex Solutions director Steven Page, who oversaw the scanning project, said that the company had scanned 789,000 sheets of paper equating to 21 gigabytes.

Mrs Hancock has installed larger hard drives on which to store the additional data in her Grande Rue office.

All the data is also backed up on DVDs stored off-site.

Mr Page said in addition to the time efficiency of the system, another benefit was that digital files would last forever.

‘Documents left in storage indefinitely will deteriorate over time and when you go to retrieve an age-old file you might find it illegible. But once on the server a file is there forever,’ he said.

Mrs Hancock employs a team of eight. After qualifying with a local firm she set up her own practice to provide an approachable and user friendly service.

‘By running my own business I can relate to the problems small businesses go through,’ she said. ‘I can understand how difficult it can be and offer advice from my own experience.’

She strives to offer clients a very hands-on and close professional relationship.

‘If I can understand their background and needs and keep them in business, they can afford to pay me.’