The hardest part about the paperless project has not been the scanning and computer time and discipline to scan everything in. It’s only taken a few minutes to scan in this week’s additions (21 new paper documents plus moving over months of previously scanned and faxed documents). The Fujitsu scanner’s fast, motorized automation, along with Acrobat’s and kip’s batch processing makes this reasonably painless. The occasional scanner jam, usually of a folded, wrinkled, mutilated or otherwise wobbly document, is the biggest inconvenience.
The really hard part is psychological: discarding the paper documents into the recycle bin. Years of attempting to be a responsible citizen has taught me never to throw away receipts, tax documents, bank statements, legal notices and a whole raft of other paper docs. Never mind that I can rarely find any of that stuff – after a year or two, it’s anyone’s guess what drawer, or box in the garage, contains a given document. Even after a month or so, I’m not sure which pile or folder or cubby has one or another documents.
On my hard drive, this stuff is vastly more accessible. Provided I’m good about backing up, these documents will also be at least as secure as the dust-covered morgues in closets, drawers, the garage and who knows where else.
As to the applicability of digitized documents to modern life, an experience we had last year proved an eye opener. Last spring, while we were on vacation, one of our cars was stolen. All of the documentation from the insurance company was digital – indeed the adjuster prefered forwarding emailed PDFs (he was delighted to learn we had email and could open PDF files) rather than faxes and mail. When it wasn’t PDF, we were looking at document images online and filling out HTML forms. Our claim was expeditiously processed.
The kicker was that San Francisco Police Department had put a couple weeks worth of parking tickets on our stolen car after it had been dumped in that jurisdiction. The court required that I pay the tickets and penalties unless I could extensively document the sequence of events (never mind that SFPD had put tickets on a car reported stolen weeks earlier), which required I go to SFPD and stand in line. I – not the cops – even had to provide copies of the SFPD tickets. I had never seen the paper copies – they were long gone by the time the recovered car – trashed and very dirty – was towed to our local garage.
SFPD (and DPT) has no computerized document management system: rather, all their reports and even parking citations only exist as TIFF and PDF scans at a company in Georgia, inaccessible to anyone but SFPD and insurance firms. At the police station, you wait for a clerk to call the scans up, presumably in a browser (only metadata is citation number – no other way to retrieve) and print them out. Thanks to a very savvy and accomodating AAA adjuster, these were promptly retrieved along with my dated stolen-car report, forwarded to me as PDF and submitted to the court (as paper printouts, of course), saving me about $1000.
There may well be instances where digital documents won’t do: I’m not a lawyer, so it would be wise to enquire before you follow down the paperless path. I’ll still keep mortgages and major insurance policies and such in paper form: everything else is headed for paperless…
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