Gaining control of your financial life is vital to avoid financial difficulties and an ideal remedy for this problem is scanning all important financial documents. This helps to have them organized, easily accessible and stored in the cloud. A systematic plan for keeping track of important papers can save hours of anxious searching. It helps in easily locating all your tax returns, insurance policies and other bills. Now, most small businesses don’t succeed in scanning and indexing their financial documents because it can be time and labor intensive, and they may not have the required resources. Big businesses usually have an efficient scanning solution or they may use the service of a document conversion company. Small and mid-sized businesses can also utilize such services that can be chosen within their available budget.
Before digitizing your financial data identify all your important documents and organize them neatly.
- Insurance policies
- Last seven years of tax documents including returns and support documents
- Ownership title documents
- Medical documents for insurance and tax purpose
- Pay check stubs
- Investment statements
- Receipts of large purchases such as jewelry, furniture etc.
Now let us see 3 easy ways to digitize your important financial documents.
Convert all your documents into PDF format
One of the simplest ways to store your financial documents is by asking your accountant to send all your files in PDF format. Converting all your important financial records into PDF files enables easy and safe storage for a longer period of time. It also allows you to store critical data with password for extra security. It is a very compact format that can contain unlimited amount of information and all the information can be compressed into a small file size that is easy to exchange.
Hire a professional
Another effective method of converting all financial documents into the desired format and organizing them is by hiring professional document conversion services. In this case, you get to work with a professional team of experts who ensure optimum quality of digitized data within quick turnaround time. These services are affordable and also save a lot of time.
Invest in a scanner
If you have the budget, invest in a good scanner. You need not worry about the legal validity of your records that you may need for tax purposes. The IRS accepts digital copies. With a good scanner in-house, you can convert paper documents such as mortgage records, letters from charities, and any other files you are comfortable maintaining in electronic form into digital files. This will help you to reduce paper in general and ensure that your office is clutter free.
With efficient scanning and indexing, you can have your files, photos and various paper documents organized and access them with the click of a mouse. Moreover, you get to save considerable money on paper and printer ink.
