Day 3! Woohoo! Hump Day! Half way through the week.
Ok, I'm going to share something first before we get into today's topic of paperless/electronic filing. So that Hump Day commercial.... I just don't quite get it. Here's why. Mr. Wonderful and I gave up TV well over a decade ago when we went through Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University (best thing evah!). Since then, we (ok, probably more me than we) find that TV in general isn't that funny, or nice, or positive. It's just noise. We are out of the loop so things that other people find funny, I just fail to see the humor. That commercial is one of them. I was told I HAD to go check it out on You Tube because it was just so funny and everyone was talking about it. So I did. And. Nothing. Oh well. At least I've seen it so I know what people are referring to when they say that so I don't feel quite like I live under a rock. So, now on to our main topic of discussion.
With more and more things going electronic/virtual/online, our paper filing is following suit. Paperless filing is done in a similar way but once the physical document is scanned and then tagged with a label, the physical document can be discarded. No more piles of paper. No more hunting for things. You can pull it up on your phone or computer.
When I was doing my homework on going paperless, I discovered that paperless consists of two parts - a scanner and a scanning app.
There are several makers of scanners (Epson, Brother, Fujitsu) and while I was doing my homework I learned that the Fujitsu Scansnap one of the best ones to purchase. Most specifically, the ScanSnap iX500 Color Duplex Desk Scanner.
Apparently, this one is the cat's meow with 4.6 out of 5 stars on Amazon (83% 5 star). And it's the one that many professionals in various businesses use as well. I saw quite a few You Tube videos on how it works. Pretty slick. But there are many makes and models out there and there's one to suit your needs. I like to check out Amazon first. One thing to look for is a scanner with OCR feature to be able to search key words in a pdf file. And scanning double sided through a document feeder is definitely a big perk if you have a large volume of paper to scan.
The second part of it is the app. Evernote and Evernote Scannable seem to be at the top of the list. Easy to install, easy to use.
For going paperless, Abby Lawson, of Just a Girl and Her Blog along with her husband Donnie, posted The Ultimate Guide to Going Paperless. It was pretty thorough and still relevant (it was posted February 2016). You can check it out here:
Another good article that's short and sweet and to the point is this:
With going paperless, you still have to sort and purge your papers similar to previous blog posts on this topic. Only instead of physically filing, you will scan. There may still be a few very important documents you wish to keep a hard copy of after scanning but those will be the exception.
For both versions of filing, whether hard copies or in the cloud, you still have to be diligent about filing. When you take a couple of minutes each day (or on a regular basis) to manage the paperwork, you will fare much better than letting it pile up so much that it has a negative affect on your mental health and looms over your head until you finally take care of it. Procrastination is not your friend.
Let me know if you've gone paperless or if you are considering it. If you've gone paperless, let me know what scanner and app you chose and what you think of the whole paperless topic.
Blessings,
Melissa