Is it possible to be truly paperless and digitize nearly every last scrap of paper? It’s a lot easier than you might think, Paul Rigby describes the right approach the right
How much physical paper do you keep? When a financial statement arrives in the mail and you don’t have time to read it, do you stash it into a junk drawer? Do old receipts line the bottom of your bag?
The time is ripe, right now, to go paperless and the reason is because we’re sitting in a transition period, not unlike the transition we went through a few years ago with photography from print photos to digital. That doesn’t just involve documents that have already accumulated in the office but also talking about future papers coming your way any moment now, such as recurring bills.
All the bills generated by those relationships add up fast. And even if you’re receiving statements by email, you’ll want to make sure they’re stored centrally, backed up and appropriately tagged so that you can find them.
If you’re ready to truly go paperless, here’s what you need to know to get started and to keep it up so that digitizing documents becomes a habit, not a one-off project.
Start by going forward, not backward
In kicking off a paperless venture, focus your efforts on how you’ll move forward, rather than how you’ll deal with the backlog, said Harris Romanoff, senior vice president of product management at Neat, a company that specializes in helping individuals and small businesses manage their paperless documents.
“What I’ve observed over the years is the prospect of getting organized or getting paper-free is very aspirational. We see a lot of interest in Neat around New Year’s and tax season but then people say, ‘Oh my gosh, I have so much!’ They get overwhelmed,” Romanoff said. The people who succeed, he added, are the ones who draw a line in the sand, a starting date for putting all their new papers into the Neat system, “Once they get up and running and it becomes part of their routine and their daily work flow, then they can start to move backward.”
Brian Berson, CEO of FileThis sees a similar tendency, “Anyone looking at their filing cabinet or drawer full of papers will say ‘Oh, I’ll do it next week.’ It may seem daunting to start but it really isn’t.”
Most people start, Berson said, by stopping paper bills from bank accounts and credit card accounts first. Next, the average paperless company movesinto bills and insurance documents and, again, these are bills that will arrive in the near future, not piles of paper in the corner of the room. Third, people typically digitize other kinds of financial accounts, like investment accounts.
Pick a service, stick with it
Once you’ve stopped paper statements on some of your basic financial accounts and utilities, you’ll want to store them in one central location (which should ideally be backed up, too).
You could keep your documents offline by storing them locally on your computer but they could eat up a huge chunk of space, depending on the quantity and quality (resolution) of the documents you keep. Another downside of local document storage is that you can’t access your paperwork from anywhere, which you can do with an online service. Say you’re at the bank applying for a loan or trying to refinance your home. The whole process will be much speedier if you can immediately, from your phone, pull up PDFs of the old paystubs and other documents that the bank requires.
Ideally, you want an online-accessible system that’s backed up and which includes tags that help you find your documents when you need them. Doxo, FileThis and Neat all offer this type of service. Each offers a slightly different level of automation. Many offer “fetch” services that can automatically pull important documents out of your email accounts or directly from the service provider. Doxo and FileThis also both offer integration with Dropbox and Box, in case you want to store your files in those popular storage accounts.
Fetching documents is one feature you’ll definitely want if you use PayPal. PayPal only saves the most recent three months’ worth of statements. If you use a digital filing cabinet that has fetch, it will grab a copy of your PayPal statement each month and save it, so you’ll have a complete history of your records. No matter which service you choose to use, pick one and stick with it.
Develop workflows
As you become comfortable with your digital document setup, you need to develop little workflows for digitizing more kinds of paper moving forward to make sure being paperless becomes a habit you keep.
Martin Stein, chief marketing officer of FileThis, said he has made it a habit to save PDFs of manuals every time he buys a consumer product that has one. He also always forwards from his email to FileThis all receipts he receives from Amazon.com.
Scan and shred time
Building workflows is all about finding small actions that have big payoff in the long run, so long as you consistently take immediate action and do the task every time there’s a trigger. If the trigger is “receive an Amazon receipt” the action is “forward it to FileThis immediately.”
Set aside scan and shred time
Eventually, you’ll have workflows in place that help you stay paperless moving, but there’s one workflow in particular you should create: a scan-and-shred time. One of the worst things you can do is let documents hang around that you simply don’t need.
Shred them!
Dedicate one day or moment in your week when you will scan and shred papers that have recently accumulated, such as incoming mail and receipts. Doxo’s Steve Shivers said for most people, 80% of what they’ll find in their piles will be shreddable. Once you get into the habit of assessing that weekly build-up, you’ll find that most of it doesn’t even need to be scanned. Shivers points to credit card statements as an example. He said you can save the year-in-review statements, and shred all the monthlies. If you use a digital filing cabinet that includes a fetch service, you already have paperless copies on file anyhow. MM
