California Surveyors Forums

I'm wondering if anyone has transitioned to a paperless land surveying office? (or nearly paperless). If so, what paper documents did you keep? Did you completely get rid of all documents older than ten years? I'm keeping all of my field notes, so I'm wondering more about paper job files.

I bought a high speed scanner and I just run everything through. It is faster than segregating documents.

I also use a scanner for just about every piece of paper that comes in the door. My scanner is just a letter-size machine, so with large-format maps I either keep it (if it's truly irreplaceable) or cut it into letter-size pieces before scanning. I get very few of those, so it's not a big concern. In my one-man office I've gone from 4 each 4-drawer legal-size file cabinets to just a couple of drawers in one cabinet. Not paperless, but close enough for my purposes.

We are trying to go paperless as much as possible. I think I am the bottleneck as I prefer to work off hardcopy and write on paper - which is usually scanned into the system. I cannot foresee a day when we do not keep hardcopy field notes. Currently, our field notes are scanned into the folder daily - technically, we could throw them away after being scanned, but we do not do that.

I decided last year to purge our files through 2010 - keeping only a few select job folders. It was a mistake. In the last year I have had a few things come up only to realize the file had been purged. I think the ten year rule better applies to construction surveying companies.

DWoolley

Thank you for your replies.
I will definitely keep all of my hard copy field notes. They don't take up too much space.
For moving forward, I think I'll buy a small format high speed scanner. I have a large format scanner on my HP plotter that's slow, but will work if I need anything that large.
I'm also a one-man office, and I would much rather have something in my hands. But space is getting limited, as I have 14 cabinet file drawers filled with paper job files.

The system I have also employs a GIS system where everything is databased and linked to Microsoft Access. All of the files are linked including field books for instant retrieval. All paperless.

That's a very nice system! I used to know one of the GIS software programs fairly well, but that's all escaped me now. I imagine it's got quite a learning curve to get that dialed in.

It is an investment in time. Once you build it, it works by itself!