I have too much paperwork that I am having trouble storing, filing,
and organizing. I?m going to start scanning everything that comes in
the mail and anything else that I normally keep.

This would include:

* Bills
* Insurance Documents
* Bank Statements
* Legal Documents
* Tax Documents
* Instruction Manuals
* Other Business Correspondence
* Invoices 
* Receipts

If I start doing this, what documents do I still need to keep the
original of? Is it only tax documents (and for how long?). What about
business receipts and credit card statement (if I am going to use them
for my taxes). Can I just shred these documents?

If it makes a difference for legal reasons, I live in NY.

Thanks.

Hi jroff-ga,

I did think about this sometime back. Anything that is related to insurance/
tax/legal, you would like to keep the paper original. Instruction manuals
for sure need not be kept in paper form(but normally they are bulky to scan!).
It is a good idea to keep atleast few Bank statements if not everything
in a sequence. Invoices/receipts and business correspondence are subjective
(if they could be used for insurance/tax/legal purposes later).

Regards
ldavinci-ga

I think it would depend on how you are digitizing them. Just putting
them on your hard drive is probably not going to measure up. But
creating PDF's and burning those to a CDROM would probably meet any
need; legal or otherwise, since this is permanent record.

To be on the safe side, and the functional side as well, I would
create searchable PDF?s if you have OCR software with that scanner,
and create an ?image? file as well, probably something like a TIFF
file, showing the exact document as an image, for producing copies of
them at a later date. CD?s when burned have file dates recorded, and
if you use the Write Only types, they can?t be altered.

Hopefully one of the Researchers will get a chance to look up the
legal stats of doing this in the state of New York, but I do know in
Seattle that several companies follow this procedure with accounting
records they have to keep for periods of time.

webadept-ga