Afilingcabinet.com

Like it or not, we’re still inundated with paper documents. From bank statements to utility bills, the amount of paper that comes flying through our letterboxes, even after we’ve sifted the junk straight into the recycling bin, is difficult to manage. According to the government, we should be storing things like personal bank statements for between two to six years, depending on your individual tax situation (see http://tinyurl.com/3a7ppr for more information). Add to that your guarantees, receipts and other things you might need for making insurance claims or similar, and it soon piles up. Afilingcabinet.com is a new service that aims to help clear this clutter and store it online.

Features
There’s nothing particularly complicated about what Afilingcabinet.com offers – it’s online storage space with a web-based interface that’s specifically geared towards storing scanned versions of paper-based documents. You could easily set something similar up yourself, except that this service has smoothed the process for adding pages to your archive with a built-in scanner driver – so all standard scanners can import directly on to the website without having to save it as an image first.

Performance
Unfortunately, we can’t scan in our passports and driving licences and completely eliminate paper documents. However, for less important paperwork, this provides a handy short-cut to setting up online storage. Obviously, security is key – if you’re putting personal documents like bank statements online, you should rightly expect a high level of security in return.

This service offers security similar to online banking, using both a password and a keylogger-thwarting pin number. Even if someone did manage to get into your filing, if you request to download a document it sends a special link to your email address that requires a code from the website, making it very difficult for anyone who hasn’t already got a high level of access to your personal information to get hold of your documents.

Ease of use
Unfortunately, it’s all this security that’s the greatest barrier to using the service, though. While uploading documents is straightforward and helped by the scanning tool, getting them back again is more fiddly. Lists of documents will soon get tricky to sift through and there are no thumbnails to give you a quick glance at what a document might contain. It also doesn’t let you make sub-folders, so by the time you’ve made a ‘bank statements’ folder, you can’t make any more to file them by year, account or any other criteria.

Value for money
Ignoring the ultra-security aspect, you could do this yourself without paying £50 a year, especially if you’re already using online backup. Scanning your documents and organising them in a sensible set of folders on your PC would cut costs significantly. However, it’s only a pound a week and, if you do a lot of scanning and saving, it’s worth the money to automate the saving and uploading of documents.