In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore suggested that theoretical computing power would double every two years; this 40 year old prediction is colloquially referred to as “Moore’s Law” and has yet to be disproven. With the raw computing power at their disposal effectively doubling every year, hardware and software makers are free to make some interesting contributions to the paperless office. An additional benefit of this technology explosion is a reduction in costs: the more time spent producing these technologies, the more efficiency that can be realized, hence the cost is driven down.

Two technologies stand out as being the most influential on the paperless office: storage and optical character recognition (OCR). OCR has improved vastly over the last decade, approaching the point where it is a viable business technology.

Storage technology is obviously crucial to the paperless office – after all, every document has to be stored somewhere whether in a file cabinet or a CD-ROM. Here, too, Moore’s law is at work, doubling the amount of storage in the same physical space roughly every two years.

A key stumbling block for the truly paperless office has yet to be fully overcome: technology is not infallible. Even the most well-designed computer system will occasionally experience service outages. Paper, on the other hand, is concrete. Paper does not require electricity and is easily shared or copied. There is also a psychological advantage to paper, in that it is a physical object that can’t just “disappear into cyberspace”. Electronic documents, on the other hand, exist only as 1s and 0s in a computer system – a computer system that could fail for many reasons. If the electronic documentation is unavailable even for short periods of time, a business can sustain substantial financial losses.

Because businesses are most likely to digitize their most critical documents to enjoy the workflow benefits, it behooves them to make their document imaging solution as resilient as possible, and the costs associated with failure-proofing an electronic system are extreme. For this reason a “paper process” is often documented as a part of the disaster recovery policy, where operations can continue on paper in the event of a catastrophic technology failure. In some cases, paper backups of the most critical documentation are maintained alongside the electronic record for backup purposes. One of the metrics used to determine if a technology investment is worthwhile is the ROI (return on investment) calculation. Despite the high initial capital investment, a business can expect the solution to pay for itself after 3, 5, or 7 years. After this threshold is crossed

Neat Receipts is intended for home use to scan and electronically index printed receipts for tax or archival purposes. The software uses OCR to scan the receipt text and automatically determine the amount spent, amount paid in tax, vendor, etc. and index the information accordingly.