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Reduce Your Paper Clutter by Scanning
Digitizing home records is quickly gaining in popularity. Paper takes up so much physical space and can make efficient retrieval of information challenging. On the other hand, digital files can be easily retrieved and shared; backed up on your computer and online (which means you can access them remotely); can be easily shared; and with password protection and encryption, can be secured if necessary.
What to scan: high-value receipts, health documents, insurance documents, children's art and schoolwork and records, business cards, magazine articles, photos, and recipes. Opt for paperless billing, banking and investment documents and save the pdfs in your digital files.
Items to keep in paper form (and in a safety deposit box): notarized documents, car titles, deeds, birth certificates, divorce papers, social security cards. (But it's good to scan these as well so that you have a digital record handy.)
Check with your accountant about documents that have to do with your taxes, mine wants me to keep the paper receipts.
The best type of scanner to reduce paper records is a sheet-fed scanner (versus a flat-bed scanner). With it, you have the ability to scan piles of paper without having to feed them in one at a time, and the scanning time is much quicker. The higher-end models offer OCR (optical character recognition) software, which turns your document into editable, searchable text, like PDFs. A few models to check out are Doxie ($149) and NeatReceipts ($179.95), to the deluxe Fujitsu ScanSnap ($199 - $595).
Before you scan your documents, know where you are going to file them, organizing them can be a breeze with cloud-based (online) systems such as Evernote or Dropbox, which work as mobile or desktop applications. The basic application is free and lets you organize scans into notebooks and files, like you would in real life. If cloud-based systems aren't your thing, develop a digital folder system on your computer hard drive that mimics your paper files. Export or "save as" scans from your scanning software into these folders. Always have a backup copy on an external hard drive. (In case of disaster, backups should be kept in a fireproof safe or at a remote location. For this reason, online backup systems make a lot of sense.)
If scanning a backlog of papers sounds overwhelming, just start with current documents and work forward. And don't forget to get rid of sensitive papers securely by shredding them. Eventually, you will have a system that frees up extra space, both physically and mentally.
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