Going paperless

In My Humble Opinion
1

Remember for years we have all been promised we would be paperless in X number of years. Yet the paper still comes in the postal mail every day and most places you buy things want to give you a paper receipt.

I decided that the banker boxes in the basement needs a fresh looking at.

So this weekend, I looked through the boxes and have decided most everything except for original legally signed documents can be scanned and stored on the file server. All that paper goes to shredding.

There needs to be a clear distinction in what is kept for informational purposes and what can be discarded.

I don’t know if after I get caught up on all this, if I will be truly paperless, but I’d like to hear from others who have tried to do this and your stories.

I was at a new doctor’s office, must have been 10 years ago, and he started the practice with everything on the computer. If someone faxed him something, the staff scanned it in and didn’t keep the paper. It is a very uncluttered office, and if you need a copy of something they can send it to the printer easily and it looks as good as the day it was scanned in. (Of course, I have to scan it in when I get home. Not sure if they would accept a USB flash drive next time.)

2

You seem to be mixing your record retention policy with your paper vs e-record policy with your record creation policy. Those are three different things.

You can certainly take steps to minimize the paper you create or receive. You can also take steps to immediately destroy much of what you receive. Note I said “destroy”, not “keep an e-copy of and destroy the original”.

There are some things you truly legally or practically ought to keep for a period of years. But it’s a tiny fraction of what most “organized” people keep. If it’s not proving your basis or ownership in a financial asset you still own and it wasn’t an input into a tax return of the last 3 years, you don’t need it. Some things, such as medical records, might still have practical value; but they’re not legally necessary. There’s not much reason any of that needs to be paper vs an e-copy.

The only category that truly needs to be paper originals is notarized stuff like wills, trusts, & related legal docs. Those can’t be e-copies. Anything else you do keep can be an e-copy or e-original.

If a typical middle class wage-earning American has more than about 1/2" of permanent retention paper files plus accumulating about a 1" stack of paper (or the e-equivalent) per year, that person is probably unnecessarily packratting.

3

Then he wasn’t really paperless, was he? Why not accept the fax by computer and bypass the print and scanner?

4

What bothers me is that when my provider sends me a monthly invoice, for a bill that has only five itemized lines for service, taxes, total, there have to be three sheets of paper in the envelope. Since they are usually printed one-side only, I have a huge stack of paper that is blank on one side, which can use for scratch paper.

The pharmacies are the worst. Every month, there are nine one-side-only sheets of federally mandated warnings, notifications and “rights” stapled to my bag.

5

I don’t think a blanket statement like that can be made. People are involved in different types of businesses, investments, hobbies so there might be much more than that.

6

Pharmacies might have to do that for compliance.

I know CVS pharmacy gives you the option of e-mailing the receipt which is good.

Restaurants still have paper receipts, but sometimes I catch odd expenses on my credit card and need to verify it, so I don’t think I can simply throw them out at the point of sale.

7

Because that’s what was available at the time 10 years ago. So your contribution to this thread is about what, again?

8

I have always thought that the “paperless society” was more of a fad concept than a logical or feasible goal. It’s one of a series of ideas that the mass media as the vague entity that it is, periodically gets caught up in, as a part of the overall “the future is going to be SO COOL because of NEW GIZMOS” trip we’ve been on since at least the turn of the 19th Century.

We have already done a lot of paper reduction. Most people can now bank online, receive and pay bills and keep track of their money without very much printed stuff at all. But if nothing else, as long as the legal standard remains that the PHYSICAL documents are taken as trustworthy and the VIRTUAL documents are not, we’ll have t have SOME paper.

I was trying to find out about that specialized scanner that was being touted a little while back, which was supposed to not only scan, but read and classify all our documents automatically, because I would have LOVED to take all the crap I collect for taxes every year, and deal with it through a robotized system, but near as I can tell, that was more or less a scam. That is, it could scan, and with “training and help,” could do some classifying, but the amount of work involved to make it function as advertised was more than the rather high price justified.

One of the things I have to do periodically, is find where I put all the old checking account records and the like, that I only kept because the IRS says it just might decide to go back seven years, and pretend I own a ton more money, out of the blue. And I know they’re all about paper.

The main thing though, in the end, is that the technology isn’t here yet to really go paperless. It still takes way too long to boot up computers, when you need data, and it’s still not feasible to expect to have access to electricity and the internet enough of the time to do away with everything. So in the end, it’s still a game of risk assessment. Throw stuff out, and cross your fingers.

9

Fax to computer was available 30 years ago, maybe more.

Even now, I often run into some office personnel who, when emailed a PDF file, prints it out, then scans it to PDF. Because that’s the way they were taught to get something into the computer.

10

Just a WAG - it was *more *common 30 years ago, because of dial-up modems. Just try connecting your computer to a regular phone line today.

11

Twelve bux’ll do it.

12

What we have been doing for personal and business tax returns, is use Turbotax software. We do a “print to PDF” of the returns with all the work sheets and an exact copy for reference that was filed. It isn’t “if”, but when I need to find something in a previous return that was created this way I can use the Acrobat Reader’s feature to scan for keyword in the folder where the PDFs are stored. Or in some cases, just copy the ones of interest to a temporary folder, and have Acrobat Reader search the folder and it finds the item quickly. I’ve started doing this with brokerage statements which I download from their website and store as a PDF.

I’m using a Brother document scanner which is a stand-alone scanner, and it scans both sides simultaneously. It’s working very well, and supports WiFi and FTP. It also supports Samba/Windows Networking crap, but FTP works so great and it is fast. So with this procedure of it going directly to the file server, no work station needs to be turned on to use this. You just walk up to it, put the document in and select where you want it scanned to on the file server.

This scanner also comes with OCR software, but I have not played around with it much, because from my experience with that sort of thing is that it isn’t perfect. And the way it was set-up, it was time consuming to use. I guess if I had a way to run a script as a CRON job for it to process scanned PDFs with OCR to be text searchable, I’d get it a try. Of course, I’d only want this run on things that were scan from paper, not the “print to PDF” documents.

The only way for it to go entirely paperless is if all the new data is never on paper to begin with. But there are services which still use paper invoicing, and postal mail it to us. When you take a deduction for business use of the home, you need to archive a lot more stuff than most people do.

13

Granted. Which is why I said “typical”, “wage-earning”, “middle class”, and “probably”.

Big difference between somebody making $45K per year with a single W-2 job and a savings account at the local bank vs. the same guy running his own 1-man construction company out of his pickup truck. Much less if he owns 3 trucks and has 10 employees, plus casual labor. Or still just has the W-2 job but rehabs & flips houses on the side, or rehabs and keeps them as rental properties.

My point was that the practical minimum for the simplest (but still hugely common) case is almost no paper and only a couple megabytes of PDF. IMO far less than most of the people in that situation actually keep.

I spent some time Googling for statistics on 1040EZ vs 1040A vs 1040 filers. Turns out the IRS doesn’t track that separately within the larger category of electronic vs. paper. Nowadays 92% of all returns are e-filed. Of the 8% that are paper-filed, those break down as about 5% 1040, 2% 1040A, and 1% 1040EZ. My bet is the vast majority of the e-filers are 1040EZ or 1040A.

14

I think some states still require amended business returns to be postal mailed, because there is no e-filing option.

I know there are a lot of people who file a 1040EZ, but I’m not one of them. I think after college renting an apartment and on a W2 job, I might have used 1040EZ, but soon I was self-employed and then owned a house. That certainly ended keeping things simple.

Just reducing paper use overall in the office, the biggest thing was going to dual computer monitors. Because before any sort of programming code was printed out to work with it, or lists of tasks, etc. Now you can bring it all up and look at it without a need to print it.