Paperless - have you done it?

[buzzlightyear]

I am in the process of analysing how I go paperless with all my investment affairs and would be interested in seeing how other people have achieved this or at least on their way towards it.

I have a four drawer filing cabinet this is full and represents 5 years of investment related documentation. How have people avoided this and done it more smartly?

I am guessing external hard drives, multi function devices with scanning, use of iCloud, spreadsheets, adobe writer are all possible requirements to achieve this.

 

[BayView]

It's impossible.

Some organisations still require original this, and original that - especially where signatures are involved.

Much of my financial stuff arrives by email these days, and I do at a guess around 95% or more of my finances online.

But I still like to collate things into groups and be able to sift through them; which requires paper to do it that way more easily for me. Hello printer.

 

[weg]

I don't worry about keeping any type of copy of paperwork, that other organizations keep copies/originals of and are easily retrieveable, ie. bank statements.

All business related reciepts must be kept for 7 years, so they'd be there, stored for you, by someone else.

I would imagine even reciepts and invoices, as problematic as they could be to retrieve from other smaller organizations/companies, would be no problem if the ATO demanded them (hence you could probably scan, store in a hard drive, then shred).

You'd just have to make sure someone has originals.

Btw,I have not been audited by the ATO, nor am I an accountant, so don't know if this is OK .

 

[our obsession]

I am in the process of analysing how I go paperless with all my investment affairs and would be interested in seeing how other people have achieved this or at least on their way towards it.

I have a four drawer filing cabinet this is full and represents 5 years of investment related documentation. How have people avoided this and done it more smartly?

I am guessing external hard drives, multi function devices with scanning, use of iCloud, spreadsheets, adobe writer are all possible requirements to achieve this.

I'm still a mixture.

Trusty filing cabinets and the external hard drives. The paper stuff gets boxed up in pretty colored boxes, then stored atop the library's bookshelves. I'm happy with that mixture (at this point.)

 

[Aaron_C]

Mine's a mixture as well. Hard copy of receipts from obvious things like petrol, office supplies etc. Trying to keep it electronic where possible.

 

[Dazz]

IMO, electronic copies of everything seems to be OK for everyone except {Govt / Banks / lawyers}.

Unfortunately, being in property, all of the important paperwork involves these three groups.....and they all seem to be stuck back in 1880, with original letters drawn up with quills, sealed with wax and hand delivered by stage coach.

Emailed PDFs don't seem to cut the mustard....

 

[devank]

IMO, electronic copies of everything seems to be OK for everyone except {Govt / Banks / lawyers}.

I generally add the digital signature to an electronic forms and finally print them as PDF and send them.

One organisation didn't accept the my neat form with the inserted signature. Instead they were happy for me to print, sign, scan and then send the scanned PDF through email. End results is exactly the same except later one is less quality. I still don't see the logic

 

[Rolf Latham]

and they all seem to be stuck back in 1880, with original letters drawn up with quills, sealed with wax and hand delivered by stage coach.

.

portrayed only like you can

But you missed the squirrel, weasel and the pigeon

ta

rolf

 

[Sim]

I am 99% paperless.

All A4 (or A4 width) paper gets scanned through my sheet-feeding scanner and converted into PDF files.

Everything smaller gets photographed using my tablet and converted to PDF using CamScanner software.

My large 3-draw filing cabinet which was overflowing (ie supplemented by archive boxes plus dozens of lever-arch files on my bookshelf) is now almost empty, with only a very small collection of items still retained in hard copy.

Regular documents such as bank statements / property management statements, etc get stored on my computer in separate folders, files named with the date eg "20120606 NAB Trust Cheque.pdf", so they sort chronologically, makes it easy to find things.

Anything irregular (eg letters, one-off receipts, etc), gets stored in Evernote, which has very good OCR capabilities and is ideal for searching. I make sure each entry is dated with the date of the document and (when I get around to it), tagged with some keywords to help with searching.

Receipt PDFs also get attached to the relevant entry in Quicken (personal) or Saasu (business + trust) for reference.

All documents on both the file system and in Evernote get backed up to multiple locations (including the cloud) using Crashplan.

Original paper gets placed in an empty A4 copy paper box (box of 5 reams of 500 sheets of paper, so stores approximately 2,500 sheets of paper).

Once the box is full, it gets put in the cupboard. Once I get more than 2 boxes in the cupboard, the oldest is put in the shed (not very waterproof).

One of these days, I'll find some secure shredding service and ditch all of the old paperwork currently sitting in the shed - I only intend to keep the most recent box of originals for emergencies.

I never intend to be able to find anything in the boxes, since they are simply placed in there in the order they get scanned - there is no index or logic to it and if I ever need to find the original, it would require me looking through every bit of paper in each box.

When catching up on the backlog of scanning - particularly of non-A4 sized receipts, I initially used Shoeboxed to do the scanning (I mail them the receipts, they scan them and put them online, I download PDF files of them and put them in Evernote). Now that I'm caught up, I'm no longer generating enough paper to justify using them, so I cancelled the service. Would still recommend it to anyone struggling with the amount of paper they need to deal with.

 

[Jamie M]

I like Sim's set-up.

At the moment - I'm a mix of paper and electronic.

I told myself I'd start to scan and store every bit of IP info that comes in - but it hasn't happened yet.

When I do get around to it, I'll store it in a dropbox folder so all can be updated/accessed on all devices.

Cheers

Jamie

 

[goonandtell]

i run a majority digital.

Anything i can't get send as a PDF i scan and shred (about once a month i do a batch). My finance is managed through a database i made and i 'attach' PDFs to transactions. In reality the database fakes it, moves the file to its own directory and assigns it an ID.

The database and directory of PDFs are in an encrypted partition of my harddrive which is synced to a network drive else where in the house. I am setting up a google drive sync as well which will see the encrypted file synced up there.

This isn't fool proof and does take time but i am trying to implement a once a fortnight bit of disciplin to take care of this and schedule any payments required. My theory on original versus scan is IF i ever get audited and IF they want originals i will have date and transaction ID and should be able to get originals of the vast majority of what i have.

Things like loan docs, section 32s, wills, etc... i still keep the original at the moment i am maxing out a 1 draw filing cabinet.

 

[DavidMc]

I am in the process of moving to paperless.

I can highly recommend this awesome piece of kit - a must have really for a SOHO user wanting to go paperless - a Fujitsu SnapScan S1300. Check out this video. Got mine from Officeworks. Available a bit cheaper from Amazon if you don't want a warranty.

Having a great scanner is a must. I did already have one on the top of my huge Dell multifunction centre but this thing is far better. The Dell one is slow, clunky with a big lid.

You can throw crumply receipts in crooked and it auto aligns them , scans both sides at the same time and is really fast. The Fujitsu software also OCRs the text and stores this as a searchable object within the PDF (so you can find via Windows Desktop search).

The process is still a work in progress. What I am currently doing is just scanning and storing into Dropbox. It's working OK so far.

Current Process is:

1. Mail items arrive and are batched up.

2. Once a month I scan all and shred originals. I figured I can print out a copy if a hardcopy is required. I don't know of anyone who insisted on an original (yet - anyone had one?).

3. Items are named in a similar fashion to Sims, 2012-06-06 Agents Statement xyz.pdf.

4. Items are categorised into folders. My current folder structure is simply:

Tax Return 2010-2011
Tax Return 2011-2012
...

In these folders I just dump whatever documents I will need to fire off to my accountant come tax time. Property specific items such as agent statements and loan statements go under a folder for each property under the Tax Return main folder. Any non-property specific items (such as my land tax bill, which is 'by entity' rather than property) will go in the root Tax Return folder.

I also have an additional folder for each property with general items pertaining to the property but are not required for tax time. Eg. condition reports, loan establishment contracts, photos, leases, etc.

<Property 1>
<Property 2>
...

It's still early days however this is an electronic version of the system I found best from my paper days. For me it's the simplest way of categorising that achieves my goals (which is just making tax time easier really). Previously I had

Everything is searchable if I ever wanted to find something I couldn't. I do not have this functionality working just yet.

The above just relates to property and tax. I have other folders for 'Payslips' and my 'Employment' related contracts, 'Investing' (for articles and strategy), 'Photos' and 'Expense claims'.

The system is still evolving and I think what works best will become clear as I go on. The future plan is to Crashplan (or similar) the document store to an offsite location (in the event of a fire/theft disaster). Many friends have NAS's however they do not protect you in the event of fire/theft. No use having a funky RAID setup when a burgler steals that nice expensive looking little black box in your cupboard.

The manual alternative for a non-techie would be to manually copy the dir to a portable 2TB HDD once a month and place in a fireproof safe - not sexy, but simple and effective.

I have security concerns over Dropbox. I tried using a TrueCrypt volume in Dropbox but then I found it would sync the entire 1GB volume constantly when I had TrueCrypt running or even if I just updated a 10KB Excel.

Would love to hear other peoples methods.

 

[HiEquity]

For multiple employers now I have been instructed to scan all receipts and other documents / contracts to the document management system and discard all originals. If it's good enough for the big companies I should really get around to it myself.

Great thread with some great ideas. Something to focus on over the next year as storage has always been a problem for us...

 

[SYD]

I'm all for paper. I love paper. I get the Internet bills via email but my preference is paper.

I don't have the time to scan all my documents and I am happy to store the paperwork in the filing cabinet.

SYD

 

[george72]

I've converted to paperless. After having a lot of boxes full of property related documents I got fed up with the amount of room was used to store these. It was also very difficult to find a document. I decided to convert to paperless. I found it quite easy.

I bought a multifunction printer and a shredder and I now scan everything. I use dropbox to store the documents and it has been very useful. I categorise mine similar to DavidMc with a tax year folder, then individual property folders and then separate them into type folders. I also label them like 20120613_PropertyName_Type. Often I have to refer to them when I'm at work so it's been very convenient. The only one negative is it does take a bit of time to scan everything. I generally just store them near the scanner and then on a weekend I'll scan them in and then shred them.

 

[vaughan]

My wife tried going paperless, including in the toilet. Completely disaster. (Say it slowly.)