Take Your Home Office Paperless [Organization #2]

In order to complete this project, you’ll need the following:

• TIME!!! This project could take anywhere from several hours up to even 100 hours. Do your best to get it done this week so we can move on to the next project.
• SPACE!! Find somewhere like the kitchen table or a clear desk to spread out.
• A good-quality shredder or access to confidential document disposal
• Boxes for sorting
• A scanner or a printer with a built-in scanner. If you need to buy something, get a printer with an ADF (Auto Document Feeder) to the scanner.
• A file box or filing cabinet. If you’re an adult, buy a good-quality file cabinet that will hold up to a full drawer and last for years. Don’t forget to consider buying used.
• Hanging files and file folders. If you had a ton before, they can be repurposed.
• Handheld label maker. It will make your files and any organizational system much neater, cleaner and easy to read. You can get out that old funky 1970’s flying saucer label maker, or even get some Avery labels and print your own. This is my baby:The Dymo LetraTag. You can get a new one on Amazon or Walmart. I like it because it’s handheld-sized so I can carry it around easily. And if I suddenly need refill tape, I can run to Walmart and get it at midnight.
• This Printable Bill Sheet
• Your undivided attention – You’ll want to sort carefully and be on the lookout for bills and statements. For example, when you run across a receipt for your annual Amazon Prime subscription or your Google Data upgrade, you’ll want to write those on the list. It’s especially important to make a note of those annual auto-pay services that you might forget. Also record your regular bills such as utilities, loans, and credit cards.

Make yourself a nice workspace to get started. It’s best to work on the dining room table or a large, clear desk surface. Make sure you have a great shredder or a box to store papers that need to be shredded. Have your paper recycling bin ready if you’re into that sort of thing. Drag the big kitchen trash can in as well.

Then grab a box (or several, depending on your level of clutter) and gather all the papers from around your home. Bills, children’s report cards, coupons, mail, magazines, etc.

Types of Files

Most people over 25 have an existing but outdated file system. Your old file system may contain one or many more of the following:

• House/Rental – It’s important to keep a copy of your mortgage or lease.
• Loans – Documents for your loans could include Student Loans, signature loans, Home Equity loans, 401k loans, etc.
• Employment documents – Contracts for hire, manager evaluations, raise documentation, employee handbooks and more.
• Kids Activities – Receipts for camps and sports clubs.
• School records – For adults and kids. This could be report cards, transcripts and maybe even certificates.
• Auto – Purchase information, service & repairs, records, payment statements.
• Insurance – Auto, Home (or renters), Life, Identity, etc.
• Subscriptions – Receipts for product, magazine, or online service subscriptions
• Clubs – Club memberships such as Alumni or professional clubs. AAA would probably go here.
• Travel – Hotel, air, and car receipts. Membership numbers for frequent flyer and hotel clubs.
• Investments – IRAs, 401ks, stocks, or other investments.
• Charity – Yearly receipts for donations
• Bank Accounts – Although you should balance your accounts at least monthly, you should keep either hard or soft copies of your bank statements.
• Ebay/Craigslist – When you buy or sell things online it’s good to keep a record so the other person doesn’t try to claim they were defrauded.
• Tax Returns – The well-known rule here is 7 years. Almost all audits occur within 3 years, but do you really want to mess with someone who can legally treat you as guilty until proven innocent?
• Legal Documents – This includes debt collections, school transcripts, Life Insurance policies, and other legal documents. There are some things you’ll need to keep the original of as long as you live.
• Critical Personal Documents – Marriage licenses, birth certificates, and other difficult to replace documents should be kept in deep storage—preferably a waterproof and fireproof deep storage location. (See the How to Replace Important Documents article on how to get copies of anything you’re missing.)
• Medical documents – Receipts and Test Results are important to keep.
• Small Business – If you own a small business you’ll need to keep receipts, invoices and proof of payment for as long as you would keep tax documents.
• News Clippings – You may occasionally get clippings for your aging grandparent appearing in the local paper. Or your child plays a prominent sport. Or you were on the front page of the paper while running a marathon (hopefully not for that mug shot!)
• Coupons – If you’re a couponing nut, you probably already have a system. If not, you should at least get a  minor system.
• Manuals/Receipts – You have manuals and receipts for home products, furniture, electronics, appliances, tools, toys, computers, peripherals, software, clothing, gifts and more. (Are you missing a manual? Amazon has a repository of electronics manuals and an efficient Google search will uncover those. See the directions from Digital Inspiration.)
• Utilities Bills – Electric, Gas, Water, Sewage, Trash, Phone, Cable, Internet…
• Credit Card Statements – Assuming you’re not a financial genius or independently wealthy, you probably have these. You may consider placing a credit card statement that has a large purchase on it like an HDTV in with the warranty information for that large purchase if your credit card has extra consumer protections that would help with replacing the larger purchase.
• Hobbies – Notes, ideas, receipts, etc. The manual and cards from your SCUBA class.
• Keepsakes – The artwork and homework your kid brought you, for example.
• Recipes – Sometimes you print them out for later and they pile up. (This subject will have its own topic later!)
• Fitness – Yep, the paperwork for the P90-X DVD set you bought. Different things you’ve printed off the internet.
• Estate Planning – Will, DNR, List of Passwords, Letters to those left behind – these should also be kept in deep storage—preferably a waterproof and fireproof deep storage location.

Getting Started

It’s time to start sorting into our categories. Remeber, as you sort, get rid of all staples, paper clips, and rubber bands. For everything in your pile/stack, you should consider the categories in this order:

TO-DO

The to-do stack will contain actionable items. An example would be your homeowner’s association bill that is overdue. That subscription that you let run out. That subscription that you let stay on autopay that you want to cancel. A birthday card from your aunt whose address you need to enter in your contacts. A stack of magazines that you WILL get through in the next week. And so on.

This category goes first because after the action you may need to scan or file the item.

SCAN

This could potentially become a very large pile. This category is defined as you want to keep it but don’t need a hard copy, or it’s so important that you want it scanned and the hard copy stored safely.

This category is near the top because after you scan something, you still have a paper that needs to be dealt with.

FILE

The goal is to keep this pile as small as possible. This category is defined as for legal or sentimental reasons, I need to keep a hard copy of this and I can’t scan it

SHRED

The shred pile will contain items that you don’t need that have sensitive information on them such as your social security number, your account numbers, your birth date, etc. These are the papers that identity thieves are looking for in your trash can and recycle bin. If you have easy access to a confidential/destroy bin, that is ideal. You can get rid of stuff in bulk. Otherwise you should invest in a good shredder.

RECYCLE

This is where you put the empty envelopes, old newspapers, magazines, and papers that you would hand to anyone off the street. You’re being a good citizen, but not an idiot.

TRASH

Unless you don’t have a recycle program near you, this will be a fairly small pile. Plastic packaging, staples, rubber bands, paperclips and the like go in here.

While sorting your documents, use the Printable Bill Sheet to keep information on your bills for organization later.

Once you’ve finished your sorting, it’s time to dig in. Start with the documents that need to be scanned. (To-Do and actions items will come last.)

Ideally, you have a printer with a scanner and ADF.

My Lexmark Pro805 Printer

The ADF, or Auto Document Feeder is the tray on the top of your printer. You can place a stack of papers in the tray and they will all be scanned together. Depending on your software, you can control how they are scanned.

• Scan to Photo – Using this setting, a flatbed scan will save the document as a photo and the ADF scan will save the stack of documents as a series of individual photos. This means that if you have 4 pages and tell the software to save it as an image titled 2012Medical, you will have the following files: 2012Medical[1].jpg, 2012Medical[2].jpg, 2012Medical[3].jpg, 2012Medical[4].jpg. Or something similar. The problem with this is that a quality scan will be a large file, and to get the file small enough you lose a lot of details.
• Scan to PDF (recommended) – If you do an ADF scan to PDF, you will get one multipage document. PDF stands for Portable Document Format. Anyone can open this file type on their computer or device with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. The advantage to using this scan method is that it doesn’t assume you have a photo. It assumes you have a document. It detects the background (usually white) and simplifies that background. It uses some smart algorithms to determine what part of the document can be compressed down to nothing and what details need to be maintained. This method results in a smaller file size with excellent readability. Do realize that however large the stack is on the ADF, that is the number of pages in your new document, so only stack like items together. If you have the expensive software (Adobe Acrobat full version or Adobe suite with Bridge) you can later split the ADF, but most people do not.
• Scan to OCR – OCR is optical character recognition. This is useful if you want to convert a paper to an editable document like a Microsoft Word document. It can be pretty time-consuming to fix, so do this one page at a time and only if necessary.

Sort Your Documents

Before you begin scanning, give yourself plenty of space and sort your documents. Look at the list above and think of how you would like your files organized in your computer. Get a stack of plain (or scrap) paper and a pen or sharpie. Label each of the pages across the bottom of the sheet with a category. Spread the pages out across your workspace. Then sort the papers onto stacks on the sheets leaving the category name showing. While sorting, use the Printable Bill Sheet to keep information on your bills for organization later.

Example of the Described Sorting Method

After you have gone through all the documents to be scanned and they are sorted into their categories, pick up a category and see if you need to make any sub-categories. For example, you may want to throw all of your utilities together in one file and not care for the order. Really, when are you going to access those? Or you may want all of your electric bills together. Or better yet, all your electric bills in separate stacks by year in order by date. You decide how organized you want to be. Remember, if you scan to PDF, every stack becomes a page in a single document.

As you make the stacks, make SURE THERE ARE NO STAPLES OR PAPER CLIPS!

Scan Your Documents

You have a stack ready to go and it’s time to scan. WAIT! Before you scan, you might want to make sure you know where you want your document to go. And perhaps have a folder ready to go. Once you’re ready:

1. Put your stack in the ADF as the label indicates. It will be face-up or face-down depending on your manufacturer. If you’re only scanning one page, it will be less hassle to do it on the flatbed scanner.
2. Open the printer software on your computer. It will look something like this:
3. Click on the PDF button. (Or whichever method of scanning you have chosen.)
4. WATCH THE SCANNER! Don’t walk away. If there’s a jam or a page gets skipped, you’ll have to delete the file and start over. If you have a particularly large stack like 5 years of bank statements, you can load part of the stack and wait until it gets down to 1 or 2 pages and slide the rest underneath. It works. I’ve done it.
5. Once the scan is complete, choose the location and name of your file.

Sort the Scanned Papers

Once the pages are scanned and saved, you need to decide what to do with the hard copies. They should go into File, Shred, Recycle, or Trash.

Make a Backup

Further down in this series we will be working on a complete backup system. The best backup systems do an automatic local backup with an additional off-site backup in case of fire or computer theft. For now, you need to back up the files you just saved. You can do that using a cloud solution such as Dropbox, or by using a thumb drive. If you use a thumb drive, take the USB drive to work and leave it in your desk. You just want to have a copy of the files on your computer and away from home.