BELLAMYBUDIMAN

The end of the year is getting near, and the holiday is on its track toward the new year. For me, most of the time, having a holiday from the office means that this is the chance to unclutter myself from months worth of bills, receipts, and a tremendous amount invoice copies I’ve accumulated throughout the year. I always try my best on keeping my life paperless, which means less hassle, less storage, and cleaning up my home would be a snap. But this is not without a challenge.

One of the first rules that I always keep in mind is that I get rid all of those unimportant receipts (Such as dinners, lunches, parking tickets, ATM receipts, and everything else that doesn’t go up to IDR 100k and more than 3 months old). This is fairly easy, just pile them up, put them in the shredder, and boom, it’s safe for disposal or recycling.

The next step I always took is to keep all the receipts for all items that come with a warranty. This could be cellphones, PDAs, computers, automobile spare parts, softwares, and sometimes books. Or in my case, generally everything that costs more than IDR 300k. You’ll never know when you would get into trouble, especially when your country doesn’t have a 30-day money back guarantee. But I do dispose them after the usual 1-year warranty expires.

The last step that I haven’t quite figure out is actually account statements. Over the years, I’ve got at least like five or six different account statements from various services, be it credit cards, cellphones, insurance, cable TV, and so forth.

Since last year, we’ve been a continuing design service provider for our US-based client called Pixily. Who are they? Long story short, they can keep all your documents, receipts, and things like that online for easy access. That means, you can simply recycle all the original papers once they have it stored on their servers. A brilliant idea which makes your documents accessible from virtually anywhere, as long as you are connected to the internet. And since they existed, that means companies in the US consider digitized copies of their receipts legit. And unlike our country, the US Government also has the Government Paperwork Elimination Act, which is a good start for having less paper clutter in your life. But giving the benefit of the doubt, can anyone point me if our government has such act as well?

As for the office, I kept a copy of Yep on my Mac. Regularly, we digitize all of our office’s receipts and statements, creating digital copies in PDF for archiving and easy retrieval whenever we need them. This is way easier than to have ourselves messing around with horde of receipts every time or so.

But even after all this effort, I still can’t decide whether I should recycle all those credit card billing statements or not. Here are some questions that I have in mind, particularly when living in Indonesia:

• Do Indonesian banks consider digitized copies of account statements legit? I once applied for a credit card (Bank Danamon), and they asked me for the real cellphone billing statements for the last three months. I asked them whether I could print digital copies and send those out instead. They said no, they wanted the REAL ones. And oh, BTW, they promised me a Gold card, and even until now, a promise is just a promise. But that’s another matter.
• How can we be paperless if PDF document copies from governmental sites are not even real PDFs. Mostly, they are actually scanned paper documents which they created with typewriters. This means, our own government doesn’t even know if Microsoft Word can export documents to PDFs for the citizens to download. Try the Direktorat Pajak, for example. Messy… Just messy.
• We don’t have a dedicated recycling center where you can go there, bring along your paper waste, and just drop them off for recycling. We do, however, have those so-called dedicated trash bins that allowed us to separate different kinds of trash into different bins. But, of course, we know that here, this method does not work at all.

Bottom line, I’d love to get rid all of the account statements that I’ve scanned, but in particular for my first question, does anyone know if that works here? Is it really hard to live efficiently here?