Even At Home Document Management Software Can Pays For Itself By: Manuel Montesino There are many advantages to a paperless office, even for solo entrepreneurs, far further than what the big-business document management software gurus have printed about. Of course, there are by now dozens of sources out there that can tell you all about the general reimbursement of paperless office software: you use less paper, so you're economy the forests; you can access your digital documents from anywhere with an Internet connection; you can modify your workflow to precisely meet the needs of your office; they go on and on. But what if you're just a guy running out of your living room, trying to make a living in this economy? Can document management software help you? Oh, yes. Imagine that you're a service provider, and you've worked for months brainstorming and working up a thorough proposal for a client. You finally finish the proposal, and your client takes it and vanishes. If you've ever been a contractor, you'll be familiar with this as a pretty common scenario. So what happens when, two years later, a similar client with a similar project condition comes to you and asks you for a similar proposal? If you run your life on paper, the likelihood that you still have that old suggestion is slim to none. But if you're on top of the game and you've already set yourself up with a home-based paperless office, you'll still have every element of your unique suggestion scanned in and stored on a hard drive, ready to be resurrected at a moment's notice. Document management software sounds like a big-business kind of thing, but the truth is that it has advantages in both work competence and your bottom line no substance if you're a multinational corporation or a loner working at home on your desktop. If you have a paperless office, you don't waste time filing and retrieving paper documents. This saves you expensive square feet in what can often be a cramped home office. The software can manage your files and drill down into them to produce reports that can make managing your personal business with ease, acting as a secretary and a business assistant all in one package. But the honest truth is that the first time that you stand up to start the process of searching for a document you have no idea the location of, you comprehend that everything is in one place on your hard drive thanks to the power of the document imaging software you bought. The reprieve is conspicuous, and the software, in that heartbeat, will have paid for itself.