Look around your office or business. I'll bet you anything what you see is pieces of paper. We've been doing business for the hundreds of years with these pieces of paper, and it's been great compared to trying to remember all that stuff in your head. But, trying to find the right piece of paper is the worst nightmare I can think of. If you or your partner or your wife or your bookkeeper or your assistant or someone you fired didn't put that piece of paper back in the right place last time, how will you ever find it. What I really hate to lose are those pieces of paper that say "Pay to the order of."

We may never be able to get rid of all pieces of paper but in the future what we are going to be striving for is a paperless office. When you automate your business or your office you are starting down the path to electronic storage and handling of all of your information. This computer will allow you to store and handle vast amounts of information in a small area on your desk. You can put in a network server in the back room and connect 5 or 10 of you together connected to one printer and one modem. You can all operate from a huge database of everything known about your customers and your business and you can keep adding to that database with every single thing that you do and every single customer contact that you have. If you keep this database organized and growing, you'll even have a ready-made training tool, so that when people leave you can train their replacements on the system in a very short time.

With a basic office automation package of Windows, MS Office, QuickBooks, GoldMine, WinFax Pro, and Pagus Pro you can talk to a client while you are making contact notes in GoldMine then pull up their job balance in QuickBooks® and answer any questions that they have about that. All the while typing up a letter to them that you can fax straight over to them confirming the transaction. You can scan in and fax over a copy of a cartoon you found about their type of business. All of this you can do while answering an e-mail from your assistant down the hall or your partner out selling on the West Coast.