Case in point, we have a small filing cabinet in our home office where we keep our “important” papers for each year, mostly consisting of billing and bank statements, receipts, and any other general documents we feel are important enought o keep around.  At the end of each year, we empty out the cabinet into an office box and keep it around until tax time, after which we put it in storage for five years, “just in case”.  At that point we take whichever is the oldest office box and dispose of it, which normally entails me sitting by the shredder for a couple of hours.  As it’s a new year, I know my day of reckoning is upon me.

Over the past few years I’ve been thinking about methods for shrinking this volume of paper considerably or getting rid of it all together.  As a result, I’ve decided to test a new method in parallel to our normal process. Essentially I’m imaging 2009 incoming documents to PDF forms prior to filing. To generate the PDF files, I’m using ScantoPDF from Softi Software, a nifty program that does just that.  It isn’t free, but well worth the $25 price tag.   Newer versions of Quicken also have a simliar capability with the added bonus of attaching images to register entries.  Our images are saved to my computer in a group of file folders I created mimicking the folder names in the physical filing cabinet. The goal is to keep this data electronic for the five year retention period, at the end of which we could permanently delete expired data with a few keystrokes.  The thought alone of not having to shred for hours was all the justification I needed.  Not to mention the amount of space and money we’ll save.

As for losing information due to a hard drive crash, our backup process has been tested before and exceeded expectations.  I’m confident it will be sufficient for the availability of our important documents.

We’ll see how it goes in 2009.  If it’s successful, perhaps we’ll go full paperless next year.