Tools

Two things we won't do

We won't quote you somebody else's statistics. There is a whole genre of figure in this subject — the average person spends six weeks a year looking for lost documents, the average office worker prints ten thousand sheets — and when you follow them back they lead to marketing material for document scanners rather than to research. Our calculator asks about your week instead. The numbers are smaller and slower to gather, and they're actually about you.

We won't quietly price your time. Multiplying hours by an assumed hourly rate produces a much more dramatic headline, and it's a number we'd have made up. If you want a money figure, enter what an hour of your time is worth and we'll do the arithmetic. Leave it blank and you'll see hours — which is the honest version, since those hours are real whether or not you'd have earned in them.

And one thing we'll say that a paperless site probably shouldn't

Some paper has to stay. Birth and marriage certificates, passports, property deeds, wills, anything carrying a raised seal or a wet signature — scanning those is worth doing for reference, but the originals still have to exist somewhere. Retention periods for tax and financial records are real too, and they vary by country and by circumstance.

Going paperless is about the eighty percent that never needed to be paper in the first place, not about an empty filing cabinet. Anyone promising you the second thing is setting you up for a bad afternoon at a registry office.