Proactive Paul

The Paperless Office and the law!

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What does the law say about electronic documents?

In the UK, the issue of digital records is dealt with primarily by two pieces of (now quite old) legislation:

• The Civil Evidence Act 1995
• The Electronic Communications Act 2000

The first talks (in particular) about digital copies of paper documents and how they might be authentic and robust depending on your IT system. And, the second recognises that digital documents may never have existed on paper, and deals with how we handle documents such as these (like a receipt from EasyJet).

In essence, if you are relying on a digital document to be a proof, then it needs to be held in an IT system which is robust and which preserves the authenticity of the document. Quite what that means will not be clear until there are a few stated cases which we can use as precedents.

In the meantime, I suggest that The Paperless Expert sets out a system which is authentic and robust!

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Posted on 15 Aug 2010 by Proactive Paul

The World is not flat!

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London Wiki Wednesday

A twofold, big “thank you” to @osmosoft who hosted @londonwikiwed on 7 Jul 2010 at their offices by St James Park. Firstly, the team at London Wiki Wednesday is always grateful for help and support with the regular meetings.  And secondly, it made me realise that the world is not flat.

Oh? You knew that already?

Well yes, most of us do! But until that upstart Galileo started mucking about with his telescope in 1610, we all thought the world was flat!

Exactly 400 years later, we have a new breed of upstart like me and @osmosoft (and a few more whom I won’t shame by naming them) who are now challenging the established orthodoxy of “work” and how we do it. There are a number of significant ideas coming out of London Wiki Wednesday and it dawned on me last night, that we are all trying to do the same thing.

At one end of the scale you have Osmosoft whose Tiddly Space idea is intended to be a robust, enterprise level tool to make a Wiki work in an extended environment across multiple organisations. At the other end of the scale you have me with my book The Paperless Expert where I show small businesses how to use a Wiki purposefully on little or no budget.

In between those two extremes I can see a number of players emerging with solutions of varying complexity and price. The one thing we all have in common is this:

• Collaboration should not focus on the “collaboration” but on the “work”.
• Documents in the traditional sense are dead.
• My generation (40 plus) possesses few individuals who are both capable of and willing to bring about change.
• The bright young things of today have no problem with electronic documents and new ways of working.
• The new orthodoxy championed by the younger generation and a few of us oldies, is impeded by a general sense of fear and inertia.

Is that the “Galileo feeling”?

It’s a case of round pegs and square holes. What may surprise most of the oldies is that they have it the wrong way around. We should not be making our IT systems support our traditional ways of working. We should be adjusting the way we work to make the best use of IT.

Did the earliest pioneers of motoring fit their cars with horse shoes?

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Posted on 8 Jul 2010 by Proactive Paul

David meets Goliath

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Self publishing your own book?

My book The Paperless Expert was printed on 19 May and went on sale on 21 May 2010. This is the first book I have ever written. It took two and half weeks to write the 184 pages and it has taken a further two and half months to get in published.

And to do that I needed 6 people:

• Author
• Illustrator
• Typesetter
• Publisher
• Printer
• Distributor

And being keen to learn about the whole process, I have ended up fulfilling 5 of those 6 roles! The only thing I couldn’t do was print a decent book on my colour laserjet printer! Nor did I want to! So, I used the Espresso machine in Blackwells Book Shop on Charing Cross Road (London). I am really grateful to Leon and the team at Blackwells, because they were truly helpful and patient.

So last week, equipped with a handful of books which were literally hot off the press at 4pm, I attended GeekCamp at 6pm! It’s an event for book lovers, and the objective is to promote real books and encourage reading.

Ooh! That was exciting! It was a bit like David meets Goliath! The big wigs from Harper Collins explained to me why my book is not a real book! But the man from Cambridge University Press was kinder, and advocates the use of print on demand for books in niche markets.

Well my book may have been self published, but it is a real book. It has an ISBN number and as soon as I have jumped through the right hoops, it will be available on Amazon. Moreover, it has a unique angle on being paperless, which I have not seen anywhere else. It offers a paperless solution which is:

• open source
• cross platform
• cost free

Some of the high calibre bods at GeekCamp were genuinely helpful and some remained aloof. Perhaps that explains why self publishing and print on demand have become so popular recently. I might even write a book about that!

For the time being I am content with just this one The Paperless Expert and we’ll see how sales go.

You should follow me on twitter here

Posted on 25 May 2010 by Proactive Paul

Profit from Green

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Cate Trotter highlights the trends

This morning, whilst looking around for London events on Eventbrite, I stumbled across a talk at The British Library which has two different titles, depending on which web site you’re looking at:

• Eventbrite Profiting from Green – How to Make the Most of Key Future Trends
• The British Library The cutting edge of green - For all businesses wanting to capitalise on the growth of green

Luckily both titles appealed to me and whilst I am always interested in profit, I am also interested in knowing what’s happening at the cutting edge. In the event, Cate Trotter’s talk was more about existing trends and their potential for development. In particular there was a lot of focus on niche markets and a concentration on suppliers of products.

None the less I did learn that 26% of the population are indifferent to green issues and that there are two small groups of 4% each which can be described as advocates and radicals. That leaves the rest of us in a majority of 66% in the middle. That band actually covers two strains of consumer who will consider the green credentials of a purchase to a lesser or to a greater extent.

The overriding message that I took from the discussion is the ubiquitous rise of the internet. I was also pleased to discover that you can now use paperless tickets on public transport in Prague, as long as you have a smart phone. That wasn’t the case in 2007 when I was there.

I am especially interested in moves towards a paperless office and so I asked Kate about service industries rather than manufacturing and retail. Whilst advocating turning off the printer, there was little more to say, and clearly this is an area which really deserves a bit more discussion. We don’t need to be in manufacturing and retail in order to adopt green measures. The book The Paperless Expert is out later this month and focuses on how small business can become paperless on a no cost basis!

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Posted on 11 May 2010 by Proactive Paul

The changing face of work

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Technology Thursday

I have had a computerised to do list for a long time now. However, at work there has still been a lingering feeling that you can judge how much work has to be done, by the amount of paper lying around.

Where I work we went paperless on 1 Jan 2008, that’s nearly two years ago. However, we still receive paperwork from lots of clients, and our hybrid system retains processes from the days of paper management. There are still batches of paper in pigeon holes, although the quantity is only around 20% of what it used to be.

Going paperless was relatively easy and one day I’ll write a book about it. An e-book? Anyway, what has been less easy is letting go of the “visualisation” of the work load and relying on the computerised to do list as a primary driver of activity. It was always rather than a secondary management tool, rather like a daily to do list on paper.

This year, the computerised to do list has become a critical mangement tool, and it’s time to change the way we think.

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Posted on 3 Dec 2009 by Proactive Paul

There are two types of people in this world

Friday Feedback

There are two types of people in this world. The people who group people into two types of people, and the people who don’t.

For many years I belonged to the group of people who preferred to use paper - at work - for reading the news - for making notes. However, following a change of rules in 2007, my business was going to be compelled to submit government documents electronically. And that’s why we took the decision on 16 Nov 2007 to go totally paperless. We implemented our system on 1 Jan 2008. It’s hard for me now to go back to the old ways of doing things. These days, I even write my shopping list on a note in my iPhone, and I take notes in meetings on either my iPhone or a laptop.

After 18 months we have recognised that not everybody shares this enthusiasm for a conversion to paperlessness! After all, 95% of our clients work in a paper-based environment. In truth our paperless system is not truly paperless, we have to scan lots of paper. We are working on a way to to say “paperless hybrid”  without using clumsy English like that!

Proactive Paul The Proactive Accountant Dot Com

Inverse relationships

Technology Thursday

Our HP printer died last week. It was a nice one, for the whole workgroup, a £400 HP 3005D. We bought it 3 years ago when duplex printing was important to us. To be honest is didn’t completely die, it just needed a new fuser. We know what that means, because we go through printers from time to time.

Anyway, since going paperless 18 months ago, we are not keen to spend another £225 on a fuser unit, when nowadays you can buy a cheap HP laserjet printer for £99. So that’s what we’ve done. We bought an HP P1505 for £99 and if it lasts a year (or hopefully more) it will be cost effective. After all, we hardly print anything these days - just the odd letter for the odd government department where we can’t do things electronically.

What’s strange is that over the same period we have gone from occasional scanning on a cheap £99 Dell multifunction printer to serious scanning on a nice Fujitsu ScanSnap 500. It cost around £360 and the installation process is a bit weird, but it’s a fantastic scanner for a small workgroup.

Why do we need scanners when we are paperless? Not all of our clients are paperless, so we have a hybrid system to help them. Do you need help?

Proactive Paul The Proactive Accountant Dot Com

The death of the Corres file

Friday Feedback

In the old days, before Proactive was a paperless operation, we used to have paper files labelled:

• Corres
• Accounts
• Tax
• Payroll

We first tried going paperless in Aug 2005, when the hardware and software really didn’t do what we wanted. For a start it was slow and cumbersome, and it did not resemble our paper system at all! It was abandoned after just a few weeks.

Then, in Nov 2007, we took the plunge again and designed our own paperless system. The trial worked, because we relied on no proprietary product and built our own system which mimicked the 4 principal paper files that we were accustomed to. It went live on 1 Jan 2008 and we have never looked back.

Naturally, not all of our customers are paperless, so we have a hybrid system. Paper may arrive in the office! Whatever it is, it leaves again promptly, whether its records going back to the client, or scanned documents which are then shredded. We no longer have walls and walls of shelving and files. All the old paper stuff is in storage and all the new stuff is in an electronic system with multiple back ups.

So what does “the death of the corres file” mean? It dawned on us this week! We always used to keep paper correspondence in a Corres File. Now that it’s electronic, it sits is a unitary repository with all of the accounts and tax stuff. That’s a good thing, because 99% of the corres is about tax and accounts. So our Friday Feedback exercise this week resulted in a modest redesign of our electronic indexing so that a written request for some accounts information is no longer a 100*** document, but a 444*** document. It’s all about processes and not about filing!

In the days of paper it made sense to keep all correspondence in one file, but in our paperless system, we keep the corres in close proximity to the electronic files to which it relates!

Proactive Paul The Proactive Accountant Dot Com

Don’t do it!

How many of you have a “to do” list? Yes, I thought so! And, how many of you have a “not to do” list? A what?

The thing which characterises great businesses, and distinguishes them from good businesses, is the stuff that they don’t do . . . the stuff that they have conscientiously decided not to do. Since going paperless, we have continued to send out traditional letters in one or two cases. We have conscientiously decided not to do that any longer. We still operate a hybrid system to accommodate some paper, but we expect all clients to have e-mail.

If you don’t have an e-mail address how can we work the paperless system? It was a big decision for us, but we made it at the end of 2008. We asked two clients to make a choice between setting up an e-mail address, or finding a new accountant. Brutal? Perhaps! Does in fit with our ethos? Yes!

Is there something that you should “not be doing”? To help you along this path, read Good to Great by Jim Collins.

Proactive Paul The Proactive Accountant Dot Com

The Advantages of Maturity

Does your IT system deliver what it promises? When Proactive went paperless in August 2005 it took eight weeks before the system was shelved. It took a further two years, and required newer, better hardware and software before the paperless system was relaunched. It became fully operational on 1 Jan 2008. We have never looked back. It’s great, and it has revolutionised the way we work!

The next big thing is happening now, it’s Cloud Computing. Since mid 2008 I have been exploring the Cloud. And, on 1 Feb 2009 I finally mothballed the old Proactive database and a new one went live. It has lasted barely one week! Today, the old trusted system has been put back into use. This time, the decision to suspend our glorious new IT project has been taken much more quickly. That means less disruption and less angst. Cloud computing has great potential. I have no doubt that I will end up doing everything in the Cloud. However, right now the market is simply too immature and the systems too slow. They did work well on a trial basis, but when put under full strain, they can’t cope. It’s like towing a caravan with a bicycle. Last summer The Economist IT Supplement said . . .

“It doesn’t matter how wonderful and efficient the IT solution becomes, if people simply cannot or will not use it, then it is useless.”

Proactive Paul The Proactive Accountant Dot Com