The war on paper, part 3

I’ve scanned up through our 2006 finances. It’s interesting to watch the trends in our organization emerge, dissolve, re-emerge, etc.

In the beginning, we kept separate folders for phone bills, utility bills, etc. We also separated our financial records between my accounts and Julie’s accounts. That lasted about a year. By end end of ‘05 everything went into the same folder.

We also worked to make the paper system work. When writing a check to pay a particular bill, we’d pull the carbon copy out of the check book and staple it to the bill for easy reference in case we ever had to look it up. We would also staple deposit receipts with the paystubs to reference we when deposited income. It was an awesome system. The problem, of course, is that we never actually needed to go back to look up any of that information. We meticulously documented stuff that just didn’t matter.

I still believe that record retention is important, that’s why I’m scanning it all in. I also believe that the integrity of your organization should correspond to the frequency with which you will need to access that data. Yes, it will take a few minutes longer to find a phone bill, assuming I ever need to find it, which I probably won’t.

Word to the wise. If you foresee yourself ever going paperless, avoid staples. Or, at the very least, get a staple remover.

Other interesting things I’ve noticed:

• While I appreciate that American express uses smaller pages for their statements to reduce paper consumption, it means they have to be scanned separately from most of the other documents.
• That said, the most common document thus far to cause a paper jam is a Capital One statement. They use pages that 8.5” wide but 33% longer, and for some reason that increases their likelihood to cause a paper jam.
• I really do like this scanner. It’s not taken me so long to get through 2005 and 2006 documents because it’s a long and arduous process. It actually only took me a couple of hours.