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Comment by throwaway290 | Hacker News Reader

> I wrote this to make “going paperless” easier. I do not have to worry about finding stuff again. I feed documents right from the post box into the scanner and then shred them. Perhaps you might find it useful too.

I know this strongly depends per country, but could anyone else share real-life experiences of going paperless?

From my understanding, if there is a sheet of paper that has special meaning, presumably you must be able to produce the original, with wet stamps and signatures, upon request (since any copy can be created from scratch digitally). So I keep loads of papers I am afraid to dispose of.

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I use paperless-ng to go mostly paperless, but I keep the paper:

I bought a simple self-incrementing stamp, which I stamp all incoming documents with. When adding the document to paperless-ng, I set the document's number accordingly, and finally I file the paper away purely sorted by ID (so I have a (physical) folder titled 1-101, one 102-231, etc.). When I need the original to a document, the lookup is very fast, and when I know I won't need the original ever again, I don't stamp it and tag it as "digital only" in paperless-ng.

Although I have not used paperless-ng (extensively) so far, I have been using almost the same method for many years and could not be happier. When I receive a document, I do the same every time:

  1) Stamp it with the pagination stamp.
  2) Scan it.
  3) Dump the scan into a single large digital folder.
  4) Dump the original into a physical folder (titled as you do).

It relieves the mental burden of categorising since you do the same every time – stamp, scan, dump. And repeat. In the very rare case you need to find the original it's also superior, thanks to OCR and the sequential numbering being represented on the scan.

This is the situation in Germany for example. You need to keep many paper originals for 10 years. You can follow a process called „ersetzendes Scannen“ but I‘m not quite sure how that works.

For me I just scan everything and than put it in a binder with a label (like 2022-1) and put the same label on the digital document. This way I still have the document and will be able to find it if needed, but I don’t have to worry about where to put it. They all just go into the same binder until it is full.

This is my understanding as an individual in Germany who is not self-employed: Original documents help you to make or defend against legal claims, so for the time being, I'd keep them during any limitation period which applies. Afterwards that paper is not really useful any more (but keeping a digital copy doesn't hurt). I suggest to find out, which periods apply in your jurisdiction.

In my case, I simply settled for the maximum of all the different periods I encountered and file originals by the year after which I can trash them and use the digitized versions for actually working with them (e.g. my tax declaration is now much faster to do). For Germany, I found that 6 years grace period should be fine. 10 years, if you're self-employed.

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