We have all dreamed of that paperless office. However, unless we capture all our receipts, every bill and invoice, in fact each piece of paper floating around your office or home office digitally are dream of a paperless office will remain just that…a dream! We need o make a deliberate effort to decide what we need to digitally capture or not and then go ahead and save it electronically or not. In such an endeavor there are a host of gadgets that have cropped up.
Receipt Scanner
There are the neat receipts and neat scan which help you scan and record in software of your choice. These are very handy for the neatnik travelers among us. Other handy organizers that make business and personal travel a breeze are the well organized wheeled tote. It has a detachable cosmetic bag and separate compartments and pockets galore to enable the well seasoned traveler to neatly stash everything s/he would like to carry.
Jetway Travel Organizer
For that fast sailing through security is the handy jetway organizer. One can stash IDs, passports and cards and safely wear on ones person so they’re easy to produce when required, difficult to misplace or leave behind.
Richard Solo Charger
Then for all those ipods, PDA, cell phone or hair dryer is the universal charger which is the answer to all our charging problems. Richard Solo Charger pictured.
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Wouldn’t it be nice not to have piles of paper in heaps, in files, covering your desk, on your kitchen table? Weren’t we promised paperless offices years ago. Except for some very determined and organized people, few have been able to accomplish this.
Banks, credit card companies, online storage companies all encourage us to save trees, take advantage of the technology available, opt for ebills and actually establish paperless offices.
It is important to make a commitment to a paperless office. Then systematically one needs to opt for ebills. Some online paying systems make this very easy and painless. Once you’ve switched to ebills, it also helps to sign on for alerts by email. This can be customized so that you’re alerted as soon as your ebill is available, 5 or 9 days (say) before the due date or if the bill has not been paid online by the due date; and of course all of the above, if you choose. There is then the task of creating electronic folders on your computer for all your payees. The ebills can then go into the respective folders, all organized for the taxman. Many businesses that provide ebills have not yet furnished a means by which individuals can mark their ebills as paid. Ebills may be available in PDF form but anything you might want to add to it cannot then be saved unless you have the appropriate Adobe software yourself. You can usually take a snapshot of whatever you have filled in and paste it and save it in Word.
It would be wonderful to eliminate all tax forms: income, business, employer…….all! But we’re not there yet. Fortunately it’s coming. Even the IRS promises to have everything in electronic form soon.
Once we’ve made the commitment to ourselves to do this it will need a concerted effort to make sure paper is not generated for anything. All invoices would have to be sent via email. If you have a business, eventually you would need to roll out an online service where clients can have accounts and be able to deal with payments etc. online. There might be stray bills that still come via snail mail. But they would be so few and far between, it would become very easy to immediately file away in the appropriately custom label file in those very stylish file drawers that are now available.
Is bill-paying getting your goat? Are those staggering heaps of incoming mail lying on your kitchen table, your dining table and coffee table making you see red? Here’s a surefire way to banish them forever.
Don’t grant them a resting place in your home…..even for a minute! As soon as you pick up the day’s mail, sort them into piles that have one of the three labels, “keep,” “toss” and “ID theft”. It’ll take 30 seconds. Discard your “toss” pile and the envelopes and inserts from the rest of the mail. The “ID theft” pile consists of those invitations from credit card companies etc. You need to shred those letters immediately before tossing them away. That leaves your “keep” pile, which are mostly bills.
Use a bill paying system for your bills. Most banks now offer free billpay or choose one that does. Financial programs such as Quicken also offer this convenience for a nominal charge. Stack your bills right next to your computer. You’ll need to spend an hour or so initially to enter them into your system. You’ll need to enter your bank account number and the account number of the businesses you need to pay, you enter right off of your bill. Once you’ve set this up, you can choose to make payments once a week or once every two weeks. Most businesses, like credit card companies let you adjust your bill due date so that you can arrange to pay most of your bills on one or two sittings at your computer.
You can even set up your payments to get paid 3 or 4 days before the bill due date. Now you’ve dispensed with envelopes, stamps, bills and all that clutter that lies around till you get your check book out and pay those bills. With a click of your mouse and five minutes of your time you’ve vanquished those staggering piles of bills!
