Head Off Most Paper Before It Reaches You

In the chapter after this one, we begin the process of selecting, setting up, and using a scanner to digitize your papers. Once that’s done, you’ll be able to discard (most of) the originals so they no longer clutter your office. That’s great—but wouldn’t it be better still if the paper never reached you in the first place?

Before we attack the current and future paper flow, it makes sense to find as many ways as possible to prevent paper from arriving at your desk at all (assuming, of course, that you can obtain suitable digital replacements). This chapter provides a few ideas along those lines.

Sign Up for Paperless Billing

Most banks, insurance companies, utilities, phone companies, period­icals, schools and colleges, tax offices, and other entities that expect money from you on a recurring basis offer some form of paperless billing (or statements) and payment. In fact, this practice is becoming so prevalent that some companies now charge extra for paper bills, while others no longer offer them at all. In a typical case, you set things up such that you receive bills or statements by email, and then pay either by credit card or by preauthorized bank withdrawal.

I’m a big fan of paperless billing, and I use it as much as I can. Without it, I have to contend with a paper check (and frequent checkbook refills), a payment stub, a stamp, and a return envelope. And after all that, I still have an outer envelope (into the recycling bin) and a paper bill I’ll probably never look at again (into the filing cabinet).

On the other hand, with paperless billing I generally get a PDF copy of my statement that I file on my disk and the convenience of paying in a few clicks—or, in many cases, none at all. In the case of automatic payments, I also get peace of mind knowing that a faulty memory, illness, or other distraction won’t leave me in the dark or the cold.

So your first mission is to think about what sorts of recurring pay­ments you make that require an exchange of paper, and see if the payee offers a paperless option. The easiest way is to look online every time a paper bill appears in your mailbox.

However, before you go crazy making everything paperless, spend a few moments pondering the following:

• Is your email under control? If you have such an overloaded Inbox, or a flaky spam filter, that you’re likely to miss emailed payment notices, you might want to think twice. Also, you might want to read my Macworld article series Empty your Inbox.
• Do you have a fallback plan? An emailed payment notice isn’t much good if you’re away from your email for a long time—if you’re on vacation, sick, or otherwise incapacitated. Does your spouse or partner have a reliable way to check and pay your bills? If not, talk it over and devise a plan before committing yourself.

• Do you monitor balances and schedules carefully? I check my bank balances several times per week, and I have reminders on my calendar about upcoming payments, so I can be certain there’s enough money in the right accounts to pay bills when they come due. If you do too (or if you’re willing to change your habits to check your balances regularly), paperless billing is a good fit for you.

  As a corollary, keep in mind that sometimes things Just Don’t Work. Random server or router outages, or other gremlins in the ether(net), might cause a notice not to arrive, or an alarm not to sound. If you depend utterly on something being “in your face” to remind you about important payments, take the occasional failings of technology into account.

If you use paperless billing, whether by choice or not, please take one piece of advice: always download your statements. That is, if the payee offers PDF copies of your statements, keep local copies, and download them as soon as they’re available. More than once, I’ve needed to refer to a statement urgently for some reason and found that at just that moment, the payee’s site was down for maintenance, or only the last three months’ statements were available and it was now four months later, or some other problem had arisen. Downloading statements as they come online prevents that sort of thing.

If manually logging in to a bunch of sites and downloading PDF statements every month sounds incredibly tedious, there’s a solution. Let a robot do it for you! Here are two examples:

• FileThis: A service called FileThis can securely and automatically deliver all your statements to your computer or mobile device, or to your favorite cloud storage service. It works with hundreds of sites, including retailers, banks, lenders, utility companies, insurance com­panies, and more. A free account lets you fetch statements from up to six accounts; paid plans, which start at $2 per month, let you increase that figure.
• Hubdoc: The Toronto-based Hubdoc also provides a centralized service for collecting and viewing statements from a wide variety of financial institutions, utilities, and other companies in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. You can also upload files in a Web browser or via email. You can view your data in a Web brows­er, or in an iOS or Android app. The service offers a 14-day free trial, and charges $20 per month thereafter.

Because sites like these must access your accounts, be sure to read their security policies before signing up. Both of these example services claim to have read-only access, and to use other measures to protect your private data. But only you can decide whether you’re comfortable with their policies.

Choose Online Bank Statements

Just as you can usually receive and pay bills electronically, you can usually do the same with monthly bank statements. Most banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions in the civilized world let you download your statements as PDF files—either instead of, or in addi­tion to, receiving paper statements in the mail. Needless to say, my own preference is to forgo paper entirely, but even if you keep receiv­ing paper statements, I suggest downloading the PDFs, because that’s quicker and easier than scanning them yourself—and it gives you a handy, searchable copy of your bank records on your hard disk.

Receive Invoices Electronically

If your work involves paying invoices sent by other people or compan­ies, you can request that they send them electronically rather than on paper. (For the flip side—sending out your own invoices—see Send Invoices Electronically, later in this ebook.) Virtually anyone—and any accounting or billing software—can generate an invoice in the form of a PDF or Word (.doc or .docx) file, which can then be sent by email. If you’ve always relied on paper invoices, this will naturally involve some changes to your workflow for making payments, and the details are beyond what I can cover here. But I merely want to point out that you need not continue receiving unwanted paper invoices; your suppliers or contractors almost certainly have the capability and willingness to switch to electronic files.

Explore Other Paperless Options

As you begin paying attention to the sources of incoming paper, you’re bound to discover other opportunities for turning off the flow of atoms and replacing them with bits. Let me give you some suggestions to spur your imagination:

• Catalogs: I’m always a bit shocked to get a paper catalog in the mail, given that the vast majority of the world’s retailers have most or all of their wares listed on a Web site—and often, have PDF ver­sions of their catalogs available for download too. (My guilty pleas­ure: the printed IKEA catalog. I also prefer the analog version of their Swedish meatballs.)

  If you live in the United States and find it overwhelming to contact each company that sends you catalogs, visit Catalog Choice, which offers a central location where you can unsubscribe from mailings of catalogs, coupons, phone books, and other advertising from a long list of U.S. companies. The service is free.

• Junk mail: You may not be able to entirely stop junk mail, but you can certainly put a big dent in it by using the following resources:
  • The page Learn How to Reduce Your Junk Mail from the Bay Area Junk Mail Reduction CampaignRecycling Outreach Coalition offers instructions for anyone in the United States to opt out of credit card offers, sweepstakes, shopping flyers, and other direct mail.
  • Stop pre-approved credit card and insurance offers by filling out a form at OptOutPrescreen.com.

• Business cards: Rather than take someone’s business card, snap a picture of it with your smartphone or digital camera and hand it right back. (I say more about this later, in OCR on the Go.)
• ATM receipts: I spent perhaps 25 years dutifully collecting my receipt every time I withdrew money from an ATM, on the vague theory that they might someday, somehow come in handy between the time of the withdrawal and the time it showed up on my bank’s Web site. They never did, so I broke that habit—and you can, too, assuming the ATMs you use give you that option. (Alternatively, some ATMs offer to send receipts by email or text message.)

Get Paperless Postal Mail

Let’s go a bit farther afield. I’m going to bring up something you may regard as unthinkable heresy, or the best thing since indoor plumbing. You can stop almost all of your postal mail entirely by redirecting it to any of several firms that will receive it for you and—at your explicit request—open it, scan it, and deliver PDF copies of your mail online. You can do this not just for yourself but also for your entire business, and this can offer an astonishing degree of flexibility in dealing with your mail.

I can feel some naysayers adopting a skeptical grimace already, but please hear me out. I’m speaking from personal experience here.

I spent five and a half years living in Paris, and before I moved there, I realized that I’d still want a U.S. mailing address for certain items that would be problematic to send directly to France. One of those things is checks: my French bank was happy to deposit checks in U.S. dollars, but only after charging me a huge fee, applying an unfavorable exchange rate, and making me wait a long time. I could have mailed checks back to my bank in the States, but then I’d have had to wait for them to make another transatlantic trip, and hope that they didn’t get lost in the famously flaky French postal system.

I discovered a company in Beaverton, Oregon, called Earth Class Mail that would receive and scan my mail for me, and—this was a big selling point—electronically deposit any checks that I happened to receive into my U.S. checking account (see the sidebar Paperless Check Deposits, later in this chapter). Junk mail could be recycled, and anything else (including letters and packages) could be forward-shipped to me at my convenience, anywhere in the world. The company offers a wide range of mail processing services too, all available from the comfort of my Web browser. It was expensive, but it was a tremendous help to me while living abroad.

Although my situation was unusual, such a service could be valuable for any person or business wanting to reduce paper and streamline information delivery. For a family, it can give you a quicker, easier way to get digital copies of your mail and a more efficient way of depositing checks—and, of course, you can always have the originals sent if you need them. A business of 50 employees could change its mailing address to that of a mail processing service, set up accounts for all 50 employees, and have the service sort and electronically deliver all the mail rather than staffing a mailroom.

In the years since I’ve been back in the United States and have had no further need of Earth Class Mail, the company’s focus has shifted mainly to business users, and its prices have gone way up. (They charge a minimum of $49 per month to receive mail on your behalf and scan each piece’s exterior. Other options, such as opening and scanning the contents of your envelopes and packages, depositing checks, and forwarding mail, require additional fees.)

If Earth Class Mail is too expensive—or just not the right fit for your individual needs—numerous other companies will receive and scan your postal mail for you, some of them charging considerably less. Other examples—none of which I have any experience with—include MailLink Plus, Mail Scan Pro from St. Brendan’s Isle, My U.S. Postbox, PostScan Mail, and Traveling Mailbox in the United States; Canadian Address, MyMail from Business Development Centre, and The Network Hub in Canada. (For similar mail scanning services in other countries, consult your favorite Web search engine.)