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Ask Slashdot: How Do You File Paper Documents At Home?
swamp boy writes "How do you file paper documents at home? I'm mostly asking about things like monthly paper-based statements that get mailed to you (credit cards, gas cards, medical bills, health insurance explanation of benefits, electricity bill, natural gas bill, water bill, etc.). Do you push to have as many sent electronically as possible? Do you scan the paper documents to store electronically and then shred the paper document? How do you manage and organize the ones stored electronically? I've been doing this the old-fashioned way with manila file folders, but as time goes by I keep thinking that I should opt for digital storage. What works for you?"
If you have a court case which requires the documents, I'm pretty sure that printing out your electronic copy won't really work, because you could have easily modified it while it was stored there.
To answer original question - I have a big file. Sometimes I prefer having something physical that can be brought out as proof.
I keep the absolute minimum amount of paper lying around.
Bills get payed and then shredded. Why keep them? Same for almost every other piece of paper. My yearly insurance policy gets stuck in a binder (and the old one gets shredded). Oh, and I keep the ownership documents for my house. That's it. If everything in my paper 'archive' is 50 pages total I'm being generous.
There is no need to keep all that junk around. In fact, I wouldn't need the paper that I do keep, because if I would ever need it I can have a replacement copy sent.
I've found that it's still just easier to file in manila folders by month. I rarely ever need to pull paper documents out anymore, but if I do need them they are there and I've got only one month of stuff to sort through. I tried scanning everything and backing up locally for about two months but dropped that method when crunch time at work rolled around.
Hanging folders with labels by category and year. Most categories only need 1 folder per year. At the end of the year, I move them to a "history" storage box and start a new set of folders.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Like any other data storage problem you have to ask yourself how you will access this data. For me there is a high probability that I will never look at an old phone bill or gas bill. In this case you want to optimize for insertion into the data store not selection from the data store. so I stick all of these statements into a big box. The more recent ones are on top so they are automatically sorted by date. When the box fills up I shred the bottom half of the box. This makes the most common case (insertion) really efficient; I just throw the paper in the box. In the rare case I need to find an old statement, I just hunt through the date sorted statements.
Do you push to have as many sent electronically as possible?
I wish we lived in a world in which there was a secure electronic equivalent to document delivery. The technology exists, but nobody uses it.
As it is, the standard is for every company I deal with to require a separate login which gives me a web interface to tracking down the documents I need. Maybe they'll send a generic email when something new arrives. The problem is that this raises the convenience barrier so high that I rarely see the documents I'm being sent when they arrive — it happens when I'm already on the site and looking around. Which means I have to remember to go to the site.
When I get something in the mail, in contrast, I can look at it immediately, and then if necessary I can put it in a to-do box, which gives me a clear indication, in one place, of all the stuff I need to deal with.
Buy a Fujitsu Scansnap -- only $254 on Amazon, and does a great job of quickly scanning piles of documents. I use the software included with the Scansnap to manage the scanned documents -- the software is quirky and quite outdated, but it was developed for your use case, and works out better in the long run than a more polished, general purpose piece of software.
Scan your entire backlog of documents, then shred everything. No more paper storage. The PDFs that the Scansnap generates are fine for legal purposes; big companies use the same software for their documents and their lawyers are fine with it.
Err on the side of not categorizing and not shredding. Only categorize into folders the stuff that you're likely to need to access by category in the future (e.g. tax documents). Everything else goes back into the envelope it came in. For bills, write "paid" on the front.
Use an appropriately-sized box to hold old mail neatly. Stick the newly-archived mail in the front (or top) of the stack such that it naturally sorts in a coarse reverse-chronological order. It's not too hard to go back through this to find stuff if you need it later and you'd probably never need to look further back than a year anyway.
Above all, don't spend more energy on the problem than it merits or else it will become a burdensome chore.
Get a sequential numbering stamp, stamp your documents, and file them in order.
Then keep info about them in a database, inputting both the unique number, and free-form tags about the document.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Lots of them. All over the house. It's a mess.
I follow IRS rules and keep 7 years of documents. When possible, I have bills electronically sent to me and I simply file them in folders in G-mail.
Each January, I create a new set of file folders (physical) that mirror the previous year's folder structure. Then, I shred the files from 8 years ago. Takes an entire hour. My files for current year and past year are in the top drawer of a 4-drawer file cabinet. The other 5 years' stuff is stored 2 drawers down. The 2nd drawer holds things like insurance info and instructions/directions (indirections??) for house-hold "stuff". The bottom drawer is for home-owners stuff, personal stuff. etc.
My work files are stored under my desk in a double-drawer horizontal filing cabinet. It holds all things work-related. But, the top drawer closest to me holds anything that is currently going on in my life, so that I have instant access when I get phone calls, e-mails, etc. On top of that, I have an organizer on my desk that holds really, really current stuff that would include stuff that I will be working with on any given day.
I have been doing this for years, and it works, as long as you keep a maintenance routine. Easy habits to get into and I am never searching through piles like I see others doing. My desk stays neat and organized and I always have what I need for any day right in front of me.
Being organized like this is essential to increasing personal productivity and producing quality work.
It is stupidly easy, but I would say that maybe less than 5% of people can achieve a high-level of organization.
Your question might come across as dumb to other slashdotters, but I find it incredibly relevant.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Even a photocopied (as in - copied onto a dead tree format) documents will be useless in many cases if you are required to have the original receipt/bill/invoice.
As for filing...
Stick everything into plastic sheet protectors.
If you need to label them in some way, either attach a post-it from the inside or simply write the label on the sheet protector with a marker.
Put sheet protectors into a binding box or two.
About once a year go through your binders and throw away the bills you no longer need.
Same procedure is useful for storing warranties, manuals and instructions nobody ever reads (but you start looking for them when something needs fixing/replacing).
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I have all (well nearly all) of my bills sent to Paytrust.
I set their address as my billing address, when they receive the paper bills, they scan them in and store them for me. Then they pay the bills for me -- I set up payment rules so, for example, if my electric bill is less than $50, they pay it automatically, if it's more than that, they email me an exception notice and wait for me to take action. It's also possible to set a maximum payment, so for example with a credit card bill, I can tell them to pay a maximum of $200 on my bill (or the total payment due if it's less than $200).
For most merchants that have electronic bill retrieval, they retrieve the electronic copy of the bill so I don't have to have a paper bill sent to them.
For merchants that don't send a bill (i.e. my landlord), I can schedule automatic payments (or do one-time payments) just like any online payment service.
They have electronic payment arrangements for most major billers (credit card companies, utilities ,etc), so they don't even need to send out a check in many cases, they pay electronically so there's no chance of the bill getting lost in the mail (though I believe that with some smaller billers, instead of an EFT, they send one paper check for all of their customers along with a list of account numbers to apply the payment to)
In about 10 years of using their service, they've never lost a payment - I've had a few checks in the mail fail to be delivered, but in all but one case, the check eventually made it, it was delayed by the post office.
Some merchants get confused when your billing address is not the same as your physical address. Sometimes they sent notices to the paytrust address, which Paytrust either scans in for you, or if it's something like an auto insurance card, they forward it to you by mail.
The only missing feature that I really wish they had is a way to upload my own invoices, so if I get a bill from my plumber I can upload it to my Paytrust account to store it and send him a check.
At the end of the year, they sell me a CD with all of my bill images on it.
I know this sounds like a paid advertisement for Paytrust, but I am just a very satisfied customer - I'm usually terrible about paying bills on time, Paytrust makes sure I make all of my bills are paid on time. Does anyone know if there any other competing services? My bank's online bill-pay service just doesn't compare - they have no way to receive paper bills and pay them for me.
If you are ever involved in divorce litigation, there is nothing nicer than being able to say "I have no such records" when your deranged spouse's even more deranged bottom-feeding scumbag sends you a discovery request listing 141 categories of documents and demands copies of all paper or electronic records in those categories.
In normal litigation this isn't as much of an issue, because the attorneys are usually able to negotiate a happy medium in which they agree not to issue nuclear-tipped discovery requests and focus on what's actually relevant to the action. In divorce, though, all bets are off, because you're paying both attorneys and an evil one can happily run through all your money (a total with which he is intimately familiar, again unlike normal litigation) by harassing you--your own attorney's fees are just handy collateral damage. Mutual destruction is by far the most profitable outcome for such sharks, since they tend not to get a lot of repeat business. (It's not just divorce, of course: if you're targeted in a SLAPP suit, or, like poor George, have otherwise angered a large corporation, you'll have the same troubles.)
Keep only what you absolutely must. The 7-year deadline is for tax returns, everything else is much more ephemeral. Search for "records retention" to find a variety of helpful guidelines.
After 50-odd years on the planet, I've found that hardly any ordinary paperwork I've kept has ever been useful. Sure, a couple months of bills or bank statements can come in handy, but even a year is more than I have ever needed (as long as I kept track of big items, like the costs of building an addition on the house).
This is especially true of old e-mail. When Cardinal Richelieu said "Give me six lines written by the most honest of men, and in them I will find something with which to hang him", that's what he was talking of. Prescient, he was. Anticipated the Internet and all that it entails.
Perhaps a link would be helpful? Neatco has a product specifically designed for your important documents/receipts.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I keep a stack of maintenance records for my car, because I will probably sell it some day, and the future owner may want that. But I will never actually refer to any of these, even if there is a question about the state of my car. I will just have it re-evaluated at that time.
I don't get any financial statements in the mail, because the institutions store them as pdfs for me. I trust them to keep accurate records. Every day I throw out practically everything that arrives in my mailbox. Occasionally I will get a personal correspondence or an actually-informative message from a financial institution.
I don't keep the records of my interactions with the government (parking tickets, licences, etc). It just doesn't seem worth the effort compared to the potential risk of some misunderstanding occurring.
I don't keep medical bills or documents, because I trust my doctors to keep an accurate medical record. And even if they fail to do so, I don't see a strong reason to care about that.
I don't keep correspondences with my children's school, because I can't imagine a reason that I would ever need to refer to that. I read them, respond as appropriate, then they go straight into the trash.
I keep documents regarding real estate ownership, but in the ~10 years of doing so, I have never referred to any of these.
So I have a couple of unsorted write-only streams of files for certain things, but everything else is either digital or thrown away. I can imagine scenarios where magically having a certain document might make things easier or simpler for me, but none of these scenarios have ever occurred to me or anyone I know. Nor do I imagine that is worth the 1-2 hours per week it would take to maintain something like that. I would rather spend that time with my kids or my friends focusing on the present.
Is this unusual?
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
Step 6 is 3-7 years depending on whether the IRS is lazy or suspects you of fraud, but Step 2 if however long you hold the asset before you sell it. If it's a more complicated investment, there may be other steps involved - for instance, the company merges with another, or spins off another company, or splits their stock, or does something else weird, so now you the stock you own isn't identical to what you bought.
If you own a house, you need to keep even more records. There's the purchase of the house, and anything related to the purchasing process (real estate commissions, lawyers, everything about the mortgage), any expenses you have that increase the basis of the house (a new garage counts, painting the inside might not), and then when you sell the house, usually you're buying another one and rolling over the capital gain into it (unless it was a loss.) You probably only need to keep documentation on a single house for 7 years after you file your taxes after you sell it (maybe up to 9 if it took you the whole 2 years to buy the next house), since the tax return from rolling over the cost documents your basis.
Usually the rule is to keep purchase records 7 years after you sell something.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I file copies of bills/statements for up to three years, tax returns for up to five(make so little no real point), and I keep them in a floor bolted safe. I love the fact it has money/passport/SS card drawers up to, and a file folder tray on the bottom.
Sometimes I burn bills/statements sooner, and that's if the space runs low. My system is new things in front so it's easy to trim the last 12.
Store receipts vary wildly. Once something is out of warranty, is not needed for insurance, or was groceries/gas that I just verified on the statement I burn them.
I personally use Pendaflex 5394 legal-size hanging tri-way folders. Basically, it has a folded paperboard divider attached that divides it into three expandable sections.
I use one folder per 'genre', with sections for "this year", "last year" and "anytime else".
My genres can basically be divided into two categories: "dead" and "useful", with two or more sub-categories per genre. The folders are all the same color (green), but the labels are color-coded.
"Dead" are things I'm filing because my parents told me I should, but I'm unlikely to ever look at or care about again. Bills in general fall into this category. I used to have one folder, but recently split the category into two: things specifically related to credit cards, and everything else (mainly because credit cards were accounting for 2/3 the volume, and everything else was getting lost in the clutter)
"Useful" things are papers I might actually need to look at again over the next year or so. Things related to insurance, tax-preparation, etc. Right now, I have 4 such folders: tax-preparation, house/car/insurance, cats (one of my cats has asthma) and "everything else".
Elsewhere, I have hanging folders with the same genre names for each past year. Sometime around January 1, I move everything from the "last year" section into its own folder in the big filing cabinet, move everything from the "this year" section to the "last year" section, and might dig through the "some other time" section if I'm feeling like it.
Why this works for me:
My old filing method can loosely be described as two boxes: "stuff" and "old stuff", I'd open bills, deal with them, and throw them in the "stuff to file" box... where they'd stay forever. Every couple of years, the "stuff to file" box would get full. I'd start digging through it planning to weed out everything but the latest stuff, then get bored halfway through and just throw it all in the "really old stuff" box. About 10 years after college, I had about 5 such bankers' boxes full of stuff that was technically supposed to be filed, organized roughly by year. It worked surprisingly well, but once I bought a house and started getting torrents of papers that had to be filed, I accumulated almost an entire box of papers in less than a year (previously, it took 2-3 years to get to that point). Worse, I was starting to spend lots of time digging through the boxes. So, I came up with a better idea.
Plan B entailed having two boxes for "current" stuff -- one for things I knew I'd probably never look at again, and one for things I thought I might need again. This strategy worked surprisingly well for a year, but became unwieldy early in year 2 because I THEN had to deal with five banker's boxes of papers: this year's dead and useful papers, last year's dead and useful papers, and a box to throw everything else into (because I knew, deep down, that I would never, ever file them properly, and the alternative was a pile on my desk that would sit forever). So, I spent some time thinking of ways to distill its essence and still keep my filing minimal and manageable, but a little more portable than five boxes that were all mostly empty.
That was how I came up with my current system. Everything still gets filed by "this year", "last year", or "anytime", but I now have a place to explicitly put things that previously fell through the cracks... things that were kind of "timeless" go in "anytime" as well. The "anytime" category actually ended up being useful in another way. Even though it means I technically have to look in two places to find something I think might be related to a specific year, it also means that the few papers I really, truly DID need to access again tend to stay in the main filing area (where I can get at them easily).
The biggest problem I had was switching to legal-size folders. Why legal-size? Because 99% of the bills I get are legal size. I can barely even remember the last time I got a bill that was small enough to fit in a letter-sized folder without having to
I can't imagine why i would keep most of that at all, but thie method for such things that works for me is a 12-month accordion file. Just keep reusing it. When you come to a month that has papers already, throw most of it away, shredding the sensitive stuff. If there's something you feel you need to keep either start a file folder for it elsewhere or leave it in the accordion pocket ntil next year to reevaluate.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Most dumbfounded I've ever been after reading any thread on Slashdot in at least a decade. There are paper filing cabinets galore, and even PaperPort has its merit, so who with any technical ability would muck with files when every filing cabinet you own, hundreds if you have them, can be on your desktop and every drawer icon a different color for selection by mouse and re-creating in printed form from where you sit??? Tell me about just *one* modern hospital that doesn't store, organize and re-create medical records just like that?
Underutilization of this technology has been one of my largest battlements. Now that I see even Slashdot isn't more into it, I think something more than technophobia is going on here. I'm really scratching my head but I can't see what it is.
The one profession that CAN NOT do without this software is Attorney. Pretty good for CPAs too. Doctors have eClinicalWorks. *What is the excuse* for being so far behind the curve, Slashdot?
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
The problem with scanning important documents is you need a good a backup system. RAID alone is not really a backup solution, ideally you want your documents stored securely in at least 2 geographically distinct locations. I've been using a hosted system called My Efact Paperless Office ( http://www.myefact.com/ ) -- they provide the scan software and host your documents securely, and every 3 months they send you a set of encrypted DVDs containing all of your scanned files. For me, paying their fee is well worth it because I don't have time to maintain my own organizational system, handle my own backups, or maintain a server -- and I know that just keeping scanned files in a folder on my desktop PC is not reliable enough. I've also used a number of different scanners -- in my business I work with a lot of 100 page batches that include different sizes and colors of paper; the more affordable scanners I have tried do not handle the different page sizes and colors well without a lot of manual tweaking on each batch -- then I finally got a $1000 Panasonic KV-S2026C and the difference is amazing. Now I can throw a mixed-size, mixed-color batch on top and scan it through and the brightness and contrast and page size get set automatically for each page.