There’s been a big push over the last 18 – 24 months by many companies (banks, utility providers etc) to move (consumers) to paperless billing; with people embracing online account access, this seems a sensible move by these companies as it gives you instant access to records where and when you’ll typically need them. Ignoring the cynic in me that say’s this saves these companies a fortune in postage costs, it’s still great news from an environmental perspective given the billions of bills that must be printed on a monthly basis.
Me personally, I’m slowly transitioning to the paperless billing, but I’m still using myhomefiling to store the PDFs where before I’d have scanned the paper copy. It’s certainly easier to manage than paper billing, especially when a multi page document comes as a single PDF. Where a paper document and a flat bed scanner could take a couple of minutes to file, the PDF takes seconds. Using the watch folder as a default download location for PDFs makes it even easier.
But what are you doing with them? Are you leaving them online and accessing them when you want? Do you know how long you can access the information for before they’re purged from companies systems? What happens if you switch service provider, can you still access your old information, or does your account get closed down? Just as importantly, do you care?
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject, so please leave your comments below.
Thanks
Dave
