| We understand where you’re coming from. Between the bills that can arrive in both paper form and digital form, documents like insurance policies and tax documents that always arrive in paper form, and bills and bank statements that often only arrive digitally, we all have documents lying around in multiple formats, all of which we need to organise and keep. Thankfully, there’s hope: let’s walk through a few ways to get all of those documents organised and in similar formats so you never have to wonder where they are.
Go Digital Where Possible
We’ve talked about some great ways to go paperless whenever possible ― especially if you find yourself addicted to the paper documents that you get in the mail ― and even discussed which documents you should keep paper copies or and which are safe to go completely digital with. Still, going paperless is only one step towards taming the document management beast. Photo by Andres Rueda.
Most banks, credit card issuers and other financial institutions are looking to save money wherever possible, and that extends to the postage costs required to send you monthly statements and bills. You can use that to your benefit and request to only receive digital statements and bills from the financial institutions that you use. Tax returns and other financial documents that you need to hold on to for future reference can be scanned, encrypted and archived with both local and offsite backups. Use this process to scan and archive documents that you may need copies of, but don’t want to get rid of the paper versions of either, like certificates, diplomas and employment contracts.
Going digital where you can also comes with the side benefit of giving you the ability to easily organise and filter things like bills, insurance policies, and other documents that come via email from the institutions and companies that send them to you. It’s very easy to organise all of your bills when you know the addresses or companies sending them to you, and you can create custom filters in your mail program to sort them all into a single folder, for example. The same is true for your insurance documents, quarterly investment statements, and other important documents: they can all be a Gmail label or mail folder away if you go digital.