Move Your Paper Files To The Cloud

Ever hear of the paperless office? It’s a bit like the flying car. It always seems to be coming, but never actually arrives. Face it. We live in paper-based world and most of us are drowning under a mountain of it. Oh, not you? What’s all that stuff on your desk and in those filing cabinets?

Of course our business activities are more electronic than ever before. Improvements in manipulating, storing and transferring data have done two things for us. One, they’ve made it easier to create more paper documents. Two, they’ve kept us from drowning under an avalanche of documentation that would have grown with the increase of office productivity over the last few decades. Even so, how much time do still spend bridging the interface between paper documents and everything computerized?

The truth is that we burn a lot of time every day copying data from receipts to expense reports, entering business cards into a database or email client, documenting expenses for taxes and general accounting activities. Then those valuable pieces of paper have to be carefully filed so they don’t get lost.

The reason is simple. The only common denominator for everybody is a slip of paper. Someday there will be an accepted electronic exchange format and all that paper will go poof! Then we can leave work early and take the flying car for a cruise around town.

Until that happy day, you’re left with a decision. Do you handle the entry and filing of all those receipts & business cards yourself, hire an assistant to do it for you, or send it to the cloud?

How can paper move to the cloud? Won’t it just fall out and rain down on your head? Not if you do it right. What you need is a cloud based service called Shoeboxed. The metaphor is the classic shoebox that you carry your receipts in to the tax preparer. In this case, the shoebox is stored in the cloud and easily accessed from anywhere you happen to be.

Here’s how it works. You gather up that pile of papers on your desk, including receipts, business cards and other documents, and put them into a secure mailer. Drop it in the mail to Shoeboxed and YOUR desk is now clean. At the other end, your paper based documents will be carefully scanned and entered into a secure online database.

This is more than a mere scanning service. Shoeboxed’s specialty is creating human-verified data extraction so the important data from the page is put into an electronic format that you can easily work with. You can create and email expense reports or export data to programs such as Excel, QuickBooks, Salesforce, Constant Contact, Outlook and more.

What about receipts you get electronically? No problem. There’s a mobile app that lets you email them in or even snap a picture of a receipt or business card with your smartphone and then email it to your personal database.

You’re grinning, now, from ear to ear aren’t you? This sounds a lot better than all that paper shuffling you keep putting off, doesn’t it? Well, wait no longer. You can get a free trial of Shoeboxed right now and see if makes your life easier and frees up time you can put to better use.

The Green Way To Get Documents Signed

We’re drowning in a sea of business paper. All that talk about computers creating the paperless office was 180 degrees out of phase with what really happened. As soon as there were high speed printers, business users started printing at high speed. This went on for decades, culminating in the rise of the professional business document shredder. They come by your office with a van full of high power slicing and dicing equipment and shovel the paper in like tree branches going into a chipper shredder. Is there any way to break this costly cycle of buying more paper so you can print more documents and then shred them to make more paper? There is, and you can thank your lucky cloud for it.


It’s cloud services that are finally starting to break the paper cycle. Clouds are nebulous things, so to speak. There is no hardware for you to deal with. You just access those clouds from your iPad, smartphone, desktop or notebook computer and accomplish what you had in mind. While on the go, you probably aren’t anywhere near a printer anyway. That means the business processes you use to get your job done have to be designed to work without paper.

This puts us in the interesting dilemma of half the people being fully interconnected online with the rest in a limbo state of half-online and half-offline. Many businesses and organizations still need those offline products like signed paper documents to copy, mail and file. Are you really going to trust email messages for your non-disclosure agreements, W9 tax forms, purchase orders or employment agreements? If it needs to pass a legal sniff test, a tweet, text message or an email just won’t do.

Fortunately, all is not lost. You may not be able to use casual online communication methods to support legally binding documents, but there is an electronic technology that does just that. Just in time, too, because business, government, health care and other serious endeavors are about to go paperless in a big way. The process is called electronic signature.

Electronic signature isn’t brand new. It’s just coming into the limelight with a recent stampede toward mobile computing and productivity oriented cost reductions. It supersedes makeshift solutions such as faxing (still paper intensive) and scanning paper documents so you can email them and have them printed off again at the far end. Electronic signature is a purely electronic system that doesn’t assume there is any actual paperwork to begin with.

RightSignature is a company in the forefront of this technology. What they’ve created is a way for e-signatures to replicate pen-and-paper signing when using a mouse and browser. The electronic documents then include handwritten biometric signatures that are legally binding. They are compliant with the E-Sign Act, UETA Act and European Directive that all establish the validity and legality of electronic signatures worldwide.

Getting a document signed is as simple as uploading a PDF or Word File to the RightSignature system, entering the required signers’ names and emails, and clicking send. RightSignature then contacts the signers by email to tell them how to access the online documents and sign them. When complete, all parties are notified and get electronic copies of the signed documents, plus a copy is archived.

It’s very similar to what you accomplish now, but without the flurry of copying, the cost of overnight mail, nor the interminable wait for physical documents to be delivered, signed and sent back. It’s estimated that the cost of processing a signed document can drop by more than an order of magnitude using the electronic signature process.

Would you like to give it a try? If you are a business or organization that needs to send out documents for signature, you can have a 5 document free trial right now. No credit card is required. Only buy the service if you like the way it works. Get your RightSignature Electronic Signature Free Trial started and see if you really want to go back to drowning in all that paper.

Document Digital Signature Made Fast and Easy

Are you frustrated because you have business documents you need to send for signature? It’s a pretty old school process, isn’t it? You have to print copies, mail them, wait for your client to sign and then send the completed documents back via return mail. It takes a long time, costs a bundle in postage, and generally brings business to a crawl. What if you could accomplish in minutes what might otherwise take days or weeks? What if you could try it for free?


This is the world of digital signature. You wouldn’t think of requiring someone to put on a powdered wig and use a quill pen dipped in an inkwell. So why are you stuck in the past century with mail and FAX? Especially since so many people don’t even have a FAX machine. If they every had one, they unplugged it at the same time they unplugged their typewriter. Today it’s all about desktop, laptop and notebook PCs, iPads, iPhones, Blackberries and the like. These people don’t want to go hunting for pen and paper. They want to mouse and swipe and be done with it in minutes. Now you can enable them to sign your documents electronically, quickly and easily.

The service you want is called RightSignature. It’s a sophisticated way to send documents for signature online. Here’s how it works. You choose a document from your favorite web application, select a Google Doc or upload a PDF or Word file. Then enter the name and email of each signer that you need on the document. Write a short subject and message and click to send. You can also add text fields, check boxes, initials boxes and other form fields that you need to recipients to complete. For many documents this will take you all of about a minute.

Your recipients are automatically notified via email that you’ve sent them a document for signature. They click on a link and are taken to the online document. They read it over and then sign. How? There are several methods that all work well. Most recipients just use their mouse to write their signature. You can also enable an option for signers to type their names to create a valid electronic signature. There’s a RightSignature iPhone App available free in the App Store so that iPhone users can sign by just using their finger on the touchscreen. Business users may sign on their BlackBerry. Even retro users who want a pen and paper solution can print out the signature page, sign it, and fax it back to RightSignature in order to execute the document.

Are these signatures valid? In this electronic age ESIGN and UETA laws have established the legal validity of electronic signatures in the US, and similar legislation has been passed in many other nations. Check out these laws to satisfy yourself that electronic signatures will work for your needs.

Your document has been signed by all parties and now it’s available for you to download as a PDF. Each signer and cc is automatically sent an email with that PDF document as an attachment. Each signed document also includes a Signature Certificate with contains signer information, an audit log and a unique identification number.

How much does this all cost? Probably less than what you are spending on copying and postage now, not to mention the waiting time you’ll avoid with digital document signatures. If you have a need to send out documents for signature and are curious if this solution will work for your business, take a 5 document free trial. No credit card is needed. Get started in just seconds. You may forget what a pen even looks like.