Cut the clutter; from banking online to digitizing documents, nine homeworkers share their secrets for paper-free productivity

Home Office Computing,  August, 1998  by John R. Quain

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

To help organize the information, CardScan distinguishes between e-mail addresses and phone numbers. Of course, the included OCR software isn't perfect. "I correct maybe one out of 10 cards," says Ferenchick. "But before, I'd have to manually type in every card."

Manage Your E-Money One of the most clutter-intensive tasks to running a home office is balancing the books. Sure, personal finance or accounting software packages will handle the number crunching, but you must still wade through bank account statements and input checks. Until now. Many financial institutions offer online banking services, wiping out the need to store statements and canceled checks.

For Sally Forester and her husband, who operate a commercial property-development company from their home in Philadelphia, Pa., the electronic banking services available to them as QuickBooks (Intuit, 800-4INTUIT, www.quickbooks.com; Win 95/NT/98; $99.95) users have been a godsend. The ability to check balances, transfer money, and pay bills 24 hours a day is "a tremendous time-saver," she says. What's more, "it eliminates so much paperwork."

For accounts payable, says Forester, "I just fill out a check onscreen, click Online, and the software connects through the Web to our bank." Then their bank either cuts the check and sends it out or, in cases where direct payment is available, credits the payee. "There's no need for envelopes, stamps, or check-signing--none of that," she says. "I can issue 20 checks in about 20 seconds."

Although Intuit doesn't charge registered QuickBooks users to log on to its Internet banking center, your financial institution might tack on a fee to access your account online. Forester, for instance, pays $5.95 a month to bank electronically. If you keep a minimum balance, however, some banks offer the service for free.

Log On to Lighten Your Load All of this advice is fine for office work, but what about when you hit the road? Traditionally, homeworkers print out and amass huge files containing all the documents they need while away, then schlep the files to and from their destinations.

To cut the clutter--and future visits to the chiropractor--Joanie Kamio found a smarter solution. A home-based legal transcriber and Web developer in Westminister, Calif., who travels regularly to the offices of her clients, Kamio gathers all her vital documents and then e-mails them to herself before heading off to the airport. But instead of having to figure out how to access her Internet service provider's mail server from remote cities, she zaps her data to her free Internet e-mail account. This way, "my paperwork is always waiting for me in my e-mail box when I arrive," she says. Whether you're traveling to Tuscany, Italy, or Tulsa, Ariz., with a free Internet e-mail account such as those available from Excite (www.excite.com) or Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com), you can access your mail from any computer connected to the Internet, anywhere.