It’s perfect time to start saying goodbye to paper bills and records

We’ve been talking about the paperless office for years, yet for many (most?) individuals and small businesses, the dream of readily available digitised financial and business records that are easily found, accurate and secure, remains just that – a distant dream.

Despite many institutions moving their bill payments and statements online, most of us it seems remain wedded to the bill on the fridge door, and the tax receipts in the shoe-box.

For many, sticking with the paper is a generational thing. For others, the physical reminder still has some level of certainty. Some of us remain wary about going paperless: multiple sites with different levels of security and trustworthiness; multiple passwords to remember (and forget); and on-line bill paying forgets that we all have other documentation that we’d like to keep secure and easily accessible by moving them on-line, such as company registration information, vehicle logs, or other tax-deductible records.

But at tax-return time, all this dissolves into stress and confusion as we try to work out what happened 11 months ago with our GST, our claimable expenses, bills paid and amounts outstanding.

In short, moving our paperwork on-line has to be free of hassles, and be easy, secure, and with real benefits.

Having one trusted site that’s easy to use, with one password, for document storage and bill paying is the promise of Australia Post’s MyPost Digital Mailbox service.

 
MyPost Digital Mailbox lets you receive, pay, manage and store some of your bills, and also offers a convenient, secure, private way to store documents on encrypted servers sitting here in Australia. For many, that reassurance will be the vital motivation, as they struggle with yet another year’s worth of receipts stored in a box, to taking the step of moving personal or business tax information information on-line.

The advantages to doing so are numerous. You can access your important papers anywhere in the world at any time (and you can actually find them as well, knowing where they are and using the MyPost Digital Mailbox search function).

They are secure, and MyPost Digital Mailbox lets you file your papers to suit your own preferences (such as finance, personal, business tax, and so on).

There’s also a MyPost Digital Mailbox smartphone App that lets you scan bills, and manage your statements and information on the move. Currently available for Apple iPhones, with the Android version due soon, the App includes a scan-and-pay feature which works with any bill that has an Australia PostBillPay barcode. Scan the barcode, and the bill is automatically filed in your MyPost Digital Mailbox.

Otherwise, you can arrange for your service provider to mail your bill directly to your MyPost Digital Mailbox. As long as you have an internet connection, you can pay your bills from anywhere with a single click. With the service also having reminder and automatic payment features it’s harder to miss due dates than ever before. And there are a bunch of new exciting features and providers to come.

Perhaps the final obstacle to moving personal paperwork on-line is the concern about identity theft. Every MyPost Digital Mailbox is private and always under your control, and in Australia Post is hosted by one of Australia’s most-trusted organisations.

MyPost Digital Mailbox is free from Australia Post, and you can claim your individual, private digital mailbox at digitalmailbox.com.au. Sure beats the shoe box.