Are you drowning in paperwork like me, and dying to start going paper free as part of your spring cleaning routine? Between the kids’ forms, the manuals, the permission slips, the bills, the important documents, the health records, the receipts, the tax forms, I’m officially crying “Uncle.” And it seems FileThis is a web service that might just be the life preserver to save me from drowning in all this paper.
FileThis is a digital mailbox and filing service that gives you anytime, anyplace, searchable access to all of your documents. The premise is pretty simple: You digitize your documents, you organize them using their tools, and you store them on either their site, a cloud service like Dropbox, or on your own computer.
The first step, digitizing, is straightforward. You either scan or take a quick cell phone pic of the document and upload it. That’s it. You’re now on the road to being even more paper free. Even simpler is the fact that you can connect all of your online accounts to FileThis–utilities, credit cards, banks–and your digital statements will get delivered directly to your FileThis account, keeping them out of your (my) disorganized email inbox.
By the way, this happens automatically every month without you having to do a thing. Awesome, huh?
After the documents are there, you can categorize and organize until your heart’s content, grouping via “cabinets” by keywords and tags. So your vital records will be in your vital records cabinet — instead of in that one drawer in your bedroom. Or was it the office?
As for your storage choices,they include the FileThis cloud, Evernote, DropBox, Google Drive, and your personal computer. And if we can combine the awesomeness of Evernote for managing documents and organization with this? Well, we might be unstoppable.
I like that my documents are available any place I have a web or cell connection, so when I’m traveling and my daughter needs to sign up for soccer and the birth certificate has gone missing, I’ve got it. And if you are wondering about security–given this is some pretty important stuff–you can rest assured that your documents will be as safe as anyone can make them. FileThis uses bank-level security tactics and has full 256-bit SSL, which is the highest standard communication security.
While there is a free account, there are also a $2 and $5 per month plans depending on how many documents you are storing and how many accounts you link.
Never again will I search for that form with my daughter’s spring choir schedule on it. Never again will I say, “Where is the manual for the security system?” As it is going off. I will take great joy in recycling and shredding all of this paper.
Go paper free by signing up for FileThis on their website.
