We would like to go "paperless" and are in the process of estimating future storage requirements for copies of checks, all correspondence, proposals, etc. which will be accessed by the Media tab. We also need to research scanners to do this. I would appreciate any information from those that have successfully converted to a paperless office.

We are not totally paperless, but do use the Media tab to store information about our constituents. The thing to remember is to link the information rather than embedding it - that way, your Raiser's Edge database won't grow unmanageable. However, you do need to consider whether you have the storage capacity for large files - when you scan a document, a graphics file is created and these are typically large as compared to regular document files. All of our "Media" files are stored on a specific drive on our main server.

Our office just went paperless. We purchased PaperSave. PaperSave sits on its own server. The scanners we purchased are the Fijitsu 6130. Going forward, most of everything we scanned/attached into the Media tab will now be scanned/attached through PaperSave and we will be using the Media tab less and less. So far so good with PaperSave.

 Hi Liz,

We are thinking of going paperless too.  Are you using the PaperSave to scan copies of the checks and supporting documents into the constituent record?  At what point in the gift processing do you take this step?  Can this be done through Batch?  We are also in the process of budgeting for mext year so I'll need to allow for this cost.  Was this unit expensive?

We use PaerSave to scan a copy of the check and all the gift correspondence into the actual gift record, so it sits with the gift itself. All the scanning is done in batch at one time and then each gift documentation automatically comes up each time you tab down to the next row. The cost probably varies per organization.