A City Clerk's Guide to Going Paperless

Why Do City Clerks Still Rely on Paper?

The clerk's office tends to be one of the most paper-heavy functions in local government because it sits at the intersection of so many other departments' output. Meeting minutes, resolutions, and ordinances originate in the clerk's office and must be preserved permanently. Licensing and permit applications, notary records, and vital records often arrive on paper forms or require a physical signature. Public records requests frequently ask for documents that were never created digitally in the first place, sometimes decades-old files stored in basements or offsite archives.

Much of this paper dependency is inherited rather than chosen. State statutes and local charters were often written when paper was the only medium for an "official" record, and many offices have simply continued the same intake and filing habits even as the rest of local government has digitized.

The result is that clerks often manage several parallel systems at once: a paper filing cabinet for historical records, an email inbox for informal correspondence, a spreadsheet for tracking requests, and perhaps a specialized system for agendas or minutes. Going paperless is largely about consolidating these into fewer, more consistent digital systems.

What Should a Clerk Digitize First?

A useful starting point is to rank record types by volume and risk rather than by how easy they are to digitize. High-volume records, the ones requested or referenced most often, produce the largest ongoing time savings once digitized. High-risk records, those tied to legal deadlines, litigation, or compliance obligations, produce the largest reduction in exposure, because a missed deadline or a lost original is far more costly than a routine filing delay.

For most clerk's offices, that points toward public records requests and meeting minutes as an early priority, since both are frequently requested, are often subject to statutory timelines, and benefit immediately from being searchable rather than filed by date in a binder. Ordinances and resolutions are a close second, particularly because residents, attorneys, and other municipalities often need to confirm the current, in-force version of a specific ordinance.

Licensing and correspondence can generally follow once the highest-traffic categories are under control. It is usually more effective to fully digitize one category at a time, including the workflow around it, rather than partially digitizing several categories at once and leaving staff to remember which parts of each process are now digital.

• Public records requests: frequently requested, often time-sensitive under state law
• Meeting minutes and agendas: referenced repeatedly and legally required to be preserved
• Ordinances and resolutions: need to be quickly confirmed as the current, authoritative version
• Licensing and permitting records: high volume in many offices, but often lower urgency per request
• General correspondence: usually the lowest priority unless it documents a specific decision or dispute

How Do You Handle Records Retention Digitally?

Every US state maintains its own records retention rules for local government, typically specifying how long different categories of municipal records must be kept before they can be destroyed, and which records must be retained permanently. Because these schedules vary significantly by state, and sometimes by record type within a state, a clerk moving to digital records should treat the applicable state retention schedule as the governing document, rather than assuming any general rule of thumb applies locally.

Digitizing records does not change what a state's retention schedule requires, it changes how the office satisfies it. A digital system should preserve the same retention classifications used on paper, so a record digitized today can still be identified and disposed of on schedule years later. This generally means tagging each digital record by its retention classification at the point of intake, not after the fact.

It is also worth confirming, before digitizing, whether applicable state law and the municipality's own policy permit an electronic copy to serve as the record of record, or whether a physical original must still be retained for certain categories. A clerk's records retention officer or municipal attorney is generally best positioned to confirm what applies locally before original paper documents are discarded.

What Are Common Pitfalls When Going Paperless?

One common pitfall is digitizing documents without digitizing the workflow around them. Scanning years of paper files into a shared drive produces a digital archive, but if staff still print requests, route them by hand, and log status on a separate spreadsheet, the office has added a scanning step without removing the underlying inefficiency. The more durable gain comes from digitizing the process, intake, routing, review, and response, not just the document itself.

A second pitfall is underestimating the scanning and indexing effort for historical records. Converting years or decades of paper files is often the most time-consuming part of a paperless transition, and offices that try to do it all at once, on top of daily responsibilities, tend to stall. A phased approach, starting with the most-requested date ranges or categories, is usually more sustainable.

A third pitfall is inconsistent metadata and naming. A digital record that cannot be reliably searched, because it was scanned with an inconsistent file name or without a retention category attached, offers little advantage over paper. Establishing a simple, consistent naming and tagging convention before large-scale scanning begins saves considerable rework later.

Finally, offices sometimes treat going paperless purely as an IT purchase rather than a change in staff habits. The software matters, but so does deciding who scans incoming paper, who confirms retention classifications, and who audits that the digital system is used consistently rather than as one more parallel process.

How Should a Clerk's Office Manage the Change Itself?

Staff training and buy-in are often the deciding factor in whether a paperless transition sticks. Clerks and support staff who have managed paper filing for years, sometimes decades, understand the existing system's quirks even if it is inefficient, and a new digital process needs to demonstrably save them time and reduce errors before they will trust it over familiar habits. Involving staff in choosing how records are categorized and named, rather than imposing a scheme designed without their input, tends to produce a system people actually use.

A realistic timeline also helps. Municipalities that expect to be fully paperless within a few months are often disappointed, particularly if historical records need to be digitized. A more workable approach sets a go-live date for new records, so that everything created going forward is digital from the start, while historical conversion proceeds in the background on a longer timeline, prioritized by the same volume-and-risk approach used to decide what to digitize first.

Because GovGrids is built as an all-inclusive municipal software platform, its records and public records request modules are included alongside the rest of its fifteen modules, so a clerk's office adopting digital records management is not purchasing a separate records system on top of other municipal software already in use.

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