Much of what is clogging up your mailbox (the real kind, kids, with the flag on the side) these days are statements from vendors (fancy term for people taking your money). And, if you’re anything like me, you’re looking for ways to reduce the amount of paper in your life. How else am I going to justify the cost of a Macbook Air or whatever fancy thing that Steve Jobs is going to sell me in October?
Whether you’re eco-conscious or looking to reduce overhead, paperless is the “wiki” of 2008. And, much like the wikis produced by big companies, they’re fouling it up as usual.
Most companies are happy to send you an email to let you know “Your Statement is Ready.” Of course, this means that you have to go their site, login, retrieve the data, save it to .PDF and the work with it.
WAY TOO MANY STEPS.
Even when I get the information, btw, it’s in an unusable format. I can’t import the phone numbers from my cell phone bill, I can’t import the charges on the company credit cart and I can’t import the information from my monthly Staples account.
Here is my alternative:
Part I - If you’re concerned about the security of email (which is the Chicken Little cry of the last 5 years), then let’s agree on a secure place for you to drop my statement. I’ll give you a public key and you go drop it off at the secure hosting site of my choosing. I’ll use my private key to go get it when I need it. Just, hold on to a few years’ worth of statement in case something catastrophic happens.
Part II - let me set up a few categories and filters for my statements. I’ll give you a list of numbers and you help me tag them to clients so I can see where I spent my time this month. I’ll let you know what my accounting categories are, and you assign them to those categories or let me filter them in QuickBooks as soon as the statement arrives.
Wrap-Up
That means, of course, that you’ll have to change the subject line of your email from “Your Statement is Ready” to “Your Statement is Now Useful”
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One of our law firms just went from emailing .pdf invoices to putting them out on the web site. I asked them to go back to the old way. The reason is that it was quicker for me. First, to get the invoice, I would have another password to deal with. Second, it involves going from one place to the next, downloading the file and then making sure it goes where it is supposed to. With a .pdf attachment, I give it a quick review, approve and forward it for payment or flag it for research later.
It is still paperless, though. I wish I could get our big firms to go paperless. Not only do they send paper invoices, they do it on that high quality, execution copy, paper. What a waste.
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