I still occasionally hear people refer to keeping a “paper trail” of an agreement or project or correspondence. I have written before about the “paperless” office movement, and it seems like deciding whether or not to keep a paper trail of things in our home businesses is definitely related. Is it still important? And what is the best way to keep a paper trail of customers/clients or other business issues?
I confess that I really don’t have a lot of hard paper files anymore. This might sound strange for someone who makes a big chunk of her living writing, but where I used to keep a printed hard copy of everything in the “old days”–most of my files are now saved on my computer and then backed up onto cd-rom periodically. I admit that I haven’t always felt comfortable with this process. Ten years ago, or even five years ago, I made sure I had a hard copy of anything and everything I wanted to save. I just didn’t trust computer files for anything important. Over the years, however, I have learned more about the workings of hard drives, servers, and how to save and file things and have used paper and manila file folders less and less. I used to think it was imperative to keep a “paper trail” of e-mails as well and those days are long gone. Knowing that important e-mails are saved on a server (and not my hard drive) is all I need to know and I don’t even keep all my e-mails like I used to–deleting what isn’t needed to keep things operational and under control.
What I do still keep hard copies of are any financial records–receipts, invoices, billing statements, tax papers, payment transfers, etc. While I no longer get hard copies of all of my financial data, I do still save a hard copy of my account statements each month. Most of this information can also be accessed online, however, so I am probably duplicating my record storage but I’m not ready to let the financial records go the way of the computer completely yet!