The Guide to Decluttering Paperwork: It’s Not as Bad as It Sounds

The romantic times when a person would be excited to see an envelope in his mailbox and expect to discover its contents are long gone. Today we know exactly what awaits us in the mailbox: advertising leaflets, letters from the bank, messages from the study fund and letters upon letters from state authorities.

At this stage, the population is divided into three types: those who pile up the letters without opening them and wait until Elijah the prophet comes to open them for them, those who open – stare at the documents and throw them in the trash, thinking that “everything must be on some computer,” and those who, in holy reverence, file each document in thick binders mottled with gray and black.

The mailbox is not the only place where annual reports accumulate, more and more of them reach our email. True, in the modern age it is possible to retrieve a lot of information even without keeping it. But the energy that needs to be corrupted on this is great and unnecessary. The solution: arrange paperwork smartly and thoughtfully.

Smart conduct in organizing paperwork

The family archive should be treated as an important information center regarding the family’s conduct. Archives should be managed according to clear and simple rules that must be followed regularly and responsibly. We recommend these basic rules:

1. Sorting: When receiving a letter, we must decide whether the information contained in it requires our action or not. If an action is required, such as payment or updating details that do need to be updated, it should be placed in the “Documents for processing” location. If no action is required, it is necessary to examine whether the document is needed or not. For this purpose, you can use the table at the end of the article, which is recommended to print and save. For example, when receiving the monthly or bi-monthly electricity bill, we must make sure that the amount charged by standing order or credit card matches the charge on the bill.
2. Filing : After sorting and handling the mail, it must be filed in an orderly manner: by subject, and within each subject – by date. Again, it’s a good idea to use the table to set aside a specific amount of time to save each document.
3. Disposal: Once a year, say in the second half of every January, all documents that no longer need to be kept should be discarded.

What if most of my accounts are on my computer at all?

You can receive a large portion of invoices and quarterly and annual reports by e-mail, or self-service – access to a password-secured area on the website of the company providing the service. It is recommended to save digital reports in an organized folder on your computer and save paperwork and handling it in this way. This is subject to prior registration for the service to receive reports by email. Many entities encourage these actions in order to save the hassle and expense involved in handling the shipment.

At the end of December 2017, a new directive was issued by the Capital Market Authority, according to which new savers and policyholders will choose how to receive the annual report: by SMS, email or mail. The default for new joiners has changed, and if the financial institution has the saver’s email address or mobile phone number, the annual report will be sent through one of them.

If you want to manage all the paperwork on the computer, the documents that still arrive by mail can be scanned to the computer into the same folders (a photocopy is accepted in court as proper evidence), but it is advisable to keep the original document as well.

Table

In order not to overload the hash of documents and files, we specified in the working paper which document should be kept, for what purpose and for how long. The following is a recommendation for filing documents according to subjects (the statute of limitations establishes a period of 7 years during which a citizen can claim financial rights or debt repayments).