While document management woes become more sophisticated as firms shift toward that Holy Grail of a paperless—or at least paper-reduced—environment, firms are finding that long before switching to new systems, it's firm-wide attitudes and habits that need upgrading.

"There is more strategy to staying paperless than going paperless," explained Jason Blumer, managing shareholder of paperless and cloud-based CPA firm Blumer & Associates in Greenville, S.C., which uses SmartVault solutions. "That's the trick, and it's a harder task. It takes the staff time and training to teach new technology tools and it takes time to get everyone ramped up and comfortable. It's hard to break old habits."

Before approaching the ramp, however, firms must discover if these are habits management even wants broken.

"You want to start at the top, and if three of the partners want to go paperless and three do not, it's probably not going to work very well," Blumer advised. "If there's a restriction on staff to deal with paper in a digital way, but one partner wants to print out, it's defeating the purpose."

Once the whole firm is on board, a game plan is essential, and Gigi Boudreaux, tax manager at New York CPA and consulting firm Raich Ende Malter & Co., recommends taking advantage of software consultants.

"Plan, plan, plan," she emphasized. "The transition is hard ... whoever the software provider is, they have consultants that know what the end product looks like. It's hard to know exactly how to search for things in a paperless environment until you do it. You should have a consultant to say, 'This is what it's going to be like when you do this.' If you don't pay attention to that, you're going to be unhappy with the results after you make the transition."

But as firms get caught up on the technology that enables a fully digital workplace and the technology itself evolves to work out the inherent kinks of this massive transition, many cannot adopt an all-or-nothing approach.

"We are not completely paperless," said Boudreaux, whose firm uses CCH Document, ProSystem fx and XCM Solutions for workflow. "Some of the issues we still have with paperless, we have in this office with about 10 clients related to one family who are very large returners. With files that big, we can't open and close the PDF file like that; it's cumbersome and has to be broken up. We haven't completely figured out a way to do that yet."

The technology is still being adjusted to simplify these processes, said Norman LeBlanc, principal and director of state and local tax services at Rhode Island-based CPA and business consulting firm Kahn, Litwin, Renza & Co., which went paperless in 2003. The firm uses CCH ProSystem fx Engagement.

"Another element that helps is that as the technology advances, software and PDF tools get a little better," said LeBlanc, who explained that the firm is also not completely paperless. "The notations and marks you can put on documents become easier and easier to do."

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