Document capture worksheet

This sizes a firm's document capture before a scanner is bought or a drive is chosen. Enter the boxes of paper in the backlog and the pages each holds, the pages arriving per working day, the scanner speed, the paper files looked up per day and the minutes each takes to find and refile, the staff cost per hour and the years each document must be retained, and the page returns the pages in the backlog, the scanner hours to clear it, the scanner minutes a day the incoming paper needs, the hours a week spent finding and refiling paper, what that retrieval costs a year, the pages retained at any time at your retention period and the boxes they would fill. Document capture is a decision with a load behind it; these are the figures, from your own counts.

The backlog is boxes times pages, and the box count is the number to get right

Twelve boxes at the worksheet's default of 2,500 pages a box is thirty thousand pages, and at forty pages a minute that is twelve and a half hours of scanner time, which is a week of one person's afternoons rather than a project. The default pages per box is a starting point the firm replaces with its own count from one opened box; a box of bound reports holds far fewer pages than a box of loose statements, and the scan hours move with it.

The retrieval cost is the figure that justifies the capture

Twenty paper lookups a day at five minutes each is eight hours a week, and at thirty dollars an hour that is twelve and a half thousand dollars a year spent walking to the cabinet. The page prints the hours and the cost so the scanner and the software are compared with the number they replace, rather than bought on a brochure. Dropbox, cited below, prices its Standard team plan at $15 per user per month, so the drive alone is not where the money goes.

The retention period sets the size of the system you are buying

A hundred and fifty pages a day over two hundred and fifty working days is thirty-seven thousand five hundred pages a year, and at a seven-year retention period the firm holds over a quarter of a million pages at any time, which on paper is over a hundred boxes. The page prints both so the retention policy is written knowing what it keeps, and so the software is sized for the archive rather than the inbox.