Smarter, greener, mobile.
- Records & Archives – ATO Retention Requirements
How long do I have to keep records for?
We can’t really think of anyone who actually enjoys sorting through paperwork for the guys at the tax office. But it is important to keep everything in a neat and orderly fashion, or you risk penalisation (hint: it’s a lot worse than the odd parking fine).
The Essentials:
You should keep all important business documents (see ‘what records do I need to keep for the ATO’) for 5 years
Documents should be well organized and easily retrievable for when the ATO drops in.You must hold on to your records until it becomes certain that no Capital Gains Tax (CGT) event can happen where the records could reasonably be expected to be relevant.
If you have electronic records, you don’t need to retain a paper copy of the information unless another law or regulation you to retain paper copies.
If you’re unsure, it’s better to have too many records than too few, but in any case a digital copy that fulfils the ATO criteria is just as a good as an original (in fact a lot better since it’s not clogging up your office-space!)
The five years begin when the records are prepared or obtained, or five years after the completion of a transaction to which the records relate.
Find out how your document management fares with the ATO Record Keeping Evaluation Tool
See the ATO’s website for more information on personal record-keeping.
Or here for more information on professional record-keeping.
- Records & Archives – Paperless Tax Records
Get the most from your tax return
Being organized throughout the year, means much less stress when it comes to tax time. Not only will it make the whole process simpler, it makes it easier for you to be reimbursed as much as possible!
So, as an Australian business, what documents do you need to keep for tax purposes?
The Australian Tax Office (ATO) asks that business owners keep all documents that are relevant to their income and expenditures. This includes papers which:
Contain “particulars of any election, estimate, determination or calculation made by the person under that Act, and particulars showing the basis for, and the methodology used to derive an estimate, determination or calculation.”
Record “every act, transaction, event or circumstance that can reasonably be expected to be relevant to working out whether they have made a capital gain or capital loss from a capital gains tax (CGT)”The great news is, the ATO accepts digital storing of records, provided that the electronic copies are a true and clear reproduction of the original paper records.
You can send us your:
Bills and invoices
Employment contracts
Receipts
Important emails and notesAnd when it comes around to tax time, they will be online and accessible to you, your tax agent or bookkeeper – even if you’re on holiday or away fro the office!
Sign up to PaperFree today!
- Green Business – Tips – is your Business Carbon-Ready ?
Is your business “carbon-ready”? What’s your “carbon footprint”?
An emerging theme for all businesses (big and small) is their degree of carbon readiness. That is, how well placed they will be in the coming “Post-Carbon Economy” where carbon and other environmental costs are priced, either via taxes on energy inputs or raw materials, or via a credit-system of some kind. Carbon is the first cab off the rank, which is understandable given the urgency and global nature of the problem, but in time we can expect all environmental externalities to be priced in much the same way. (Prediction: water will be next).
A PaperFree office not only increases efficiency through reduced overheads and increased RoI (Return on Information), – there are major environmental benefits too. By cutting back on paper usage, or rather by freeing up your idle paper, your business will save wood, water and energy, and cut pollution and solid waste.
Check out the EDF’s Paper Calculator to find out how many trees, how much energy, and how much waste is involved in your paper usage. (It may shock you but you will have to face this sometime – might as well face it now and evolve ahead of your competition!)
We did some quick calculations of our own. These are just some of the specific benefits we discovered.
Using less paper:
- Reduces wastewater associated with new paper production, saving 68,000 litres for every metric ton of typical (50% recycled) copy paper not used for archival
- Reduces energy consumption associated with new paper production, saving 28 million BTUs for every metric ton of typical copy paper not used for archival
- Reduces greenhouse gas emissions associated with new paper production, avoiding 2,325 kgs CO2 equivalent gases for every metric ton of typical copy paper not used for archival
- Reduces solid waste associated with new paper production, avoiding 774 kgs of landfill or incinerated sludge for every metric ton of typical copy paper not used for archival
Quite apart from the benefits of reduced new paper production, bear in mind that paper archives are typically climate-controllled to maintain the longevity of the paper. The energy costs of this vary by locale and the methods/technologies used, but suffice to say that these are a significant contributor to CO2 emissions.
Digital storage has its own energy costs, to be sure, but there is a strong trend to the “greening” of data centres. This a subject unto itself, with many exciting developments in the area, so I will make it the topic of a further blogpost !
- The Paperless Office – Better Data Access
Can you imagine being able to Google your filing cabinets? Imagine how quickly you could find what you need. Perhaps locate information you didn’t even know you had?
It’s been reported* that professionals spend 5-15% of their time reading information, but up to 50% looking for it. This represents huge organizational costs.
IT research and analysis organization The Butler Group** reported that ineffective searches and time wasted looking for information can cost companies up to 10% in salary expenses.
From old invoices to contracts and emails, the sheer amount of information the typical business needs to store and locate is staggering. What really complicates the picture is the different storage types and different locations that are used to hold it all. It’s little wonder important pieces of the puzzle simply slip through the cracks and can prove very time consuming and costly to track down.
PaperFree allows you to securely store and search online for all your documents (regardless of format) from one simple interface.
Send us your documents, we securely scan and store, and then you access them whenever you need them via a simple keyword search, online, highlighting the words/phrases on the relevant page.
And because all your documents are securely backed up online, you and your colleagues can access them anywhere in the world.
Having quick access to documents not only saves you time, stress and money internally, but allows you to provide a smoother experience to your clients. And who doesn’t want happy customers!?
Sources:
**http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/102006-search-cuts-productivity.html*http://aiim.typepad.com/aiim_blog/2008/10/10-fast-facts-a.html
- The Paperless Office – Mobile Business
Lifestyle entrepreneurs like to talk about “multi-dimensional wealth”. In other words, a person’s wealth cannot be measured merely in money, but in other ‘dimensions’ such as mobility and time.
We are all striving for more freedom to get things done on the move. Witness the seemingly insatiable demand for mobile apps – the by-words of the iPhone generation are virtualisation and convergence. Virtual versions of all previously separate hardware- or specific place-bound activities, turned into software and wrapped up in the one, pocket-sized device. Games on the move, Weather reports on the move, Lead-tracking on the move…
Most of us struggle with competing work commitments. Having several projects on the go, not to mention general admin obligations and management duties, leads to piles of paperwork. Getting through it all never seems to make it off the to-do list and ties us to our desks.
So the fact that you’re often away from the office is now just a fact of the competitive landscape. Staying mobile keeps you agile and responsive – whatever it is your client needs. But have your work tools and practices kept pace, or is paper dragging you down? Most of us have felt it…you leave documents behind by mistake, you break a sweat having to carry huge amounts of paperwork with you.
What would it be like to have access to all your documents electronically, all the time? PaperFree allows you to access all your documents, not just those which began life in digital form, wherever you are and whenever you need them. Cardfile customer records? Filed paper warranty records? An elusive invoice for the tax-man? Simply search for the document you need, and voila!, all the information you need is at hand. It might as well be Google, but for your paper.
Secure assignable login credentials means that you can grant access to colleagues, partners or your service providers and they can access the documents safely and easily from anywhere also. So everybody’s wealthier !
- Records & Archives – Better Archiving Solution
We all know the feeling. Paperwork piling up around you – sure, you know it has to be sorted at some point, but other projects invariably take priority (ie. the ones that actually make you money!) So you push it to one side, or put it out of sight somewhere for when you have the time to file it “properly”.
Consider these statistics from a PriceWaterhouseCoopers (USA) study:
- Companies spend US$20 in labor to file a document, US$120 in labor to find a misfiled document, and $220 in labor to reproduce a lost document
- 7.5% of all documents get lost, and 3% of the remainder get misfiled
- Professionals spend 5-15% of their time reading information, but up to 50% looking for it.
The alien observer would think we were still living pre-Information Age, right?
It’s just not quite right. Even the most modest business IT outlay these days will put enough computing power at your disposal to search the entire web – billions and billions of documents. If only it could reach into your few hundred or thousands of paper files…
What if filing and searching for your paper documents was just as easy as handling the you could send all your paperwork away, for someone else to store for you? And you could find a single document with a simple online search? What would you do with all that extra time? What could you do with all that extra space?
PaperFree clients have understandably asked about security – a bonus of digital archiving is actually enhanced security by getting rid of duplicate documents, reducing the risk of documents ending up in the wrong hands. And because all your documents are backed up online, you’re safeguarding against possible document loss.
Bigger companies have indeed been able to achieve all these things – freeing up time, freeing up space, increasing document security – by outsourcing digitising work to traditional bureaus who will scan and index for a fee. The trouble is that traditional document scanning and archival is all about economies of scale, and the prices involved are decidedly big-end-of-town. This has put this kind of service out of the reach of the smaller operator.
- The PaperFree Office – Free Your Paper and Your Mind will Follow !
Drowning in a sea of paper? Then we are on a mission to help you !
My name is Jason Patton and I’m the co-founder and CEO of PaperFree - The Search Engine for Your Paper. What we exist to do is to save you time, save you money and save the planet by PaperFree’ing your business:
- We free your information from the paper it’s printed on (ever tried to Google your paper archives?)
- We free your paper from your offices and archives, feeding it back into the recycling cycle
- We free you from your paper problems
In October 2008, PaperFree co-founder Wayne Butcher had had enough. He was moving house yet again, and was frustrated at having to blow the dust off several storage boxes and lever arch files full of paper. You know, all those myriad papers that for the most part he would never take a second look at, but just had to keep, either for his business internally, or to satisfy the tax man, or for any other reason.
He thought to himself “in the age of space tourism, genetic fingerprinting and nano-manufacturing, there must be a simpler, better, and d*mnit, a greener way to deal with all these papers! With mobile ambitions, the thought of storing the boxes in his dad’s shed didn’t quite cut it. (His dad was none too keen on the idea either!) And with a lean budget, the big-end-of-town pricing of a traditional archive storage and retrieval firm didn’t fit the bill either. The PaperFree seed had sprouted…
The concept:
- You give all your paper files/archives/records/forms/docs to us (in envelopes or boxes that we provide)
- We securely digitise (scan) them and store them online
- You and your trusted service providers can search them – anytime, anywhere
Wayne’s story and basic idea hit a strong chord with me and after running it by as many people as would listen, we soon realised that there was a ready army of paper slaves out there, just waiting to be ‘Freed.
So we are building it – PaperFree - The Search Engine for Your Paper.
Let’s be clear about one thing upfront – we are not proposing to turn yours into a “paperless office”. The paperless office was a dystopian myth of the 80s that we suggest is best forgotten (along with a few other things from that decade…)
On the contrary, we REJOICE in paper. Paper can be so incredibly useful – handy, quick, simple, often even beautiful (if sometimes just a little dangerous…paper cuts – ouch!) There will always be a place for it – we can think of at least 13 legitimate uses for paper right here. It’s just that it gets put to use in PLENTY of inappropriate, unsustainable ways as well, and that simply cannot go on. For example, one of those inappropriate, unsustainable and just plain unnecessary uses is stored tax records. The ATO has ruled on this, and it is quite clear that if done right, a digitised copy is just as good as the original. So, let’s free up that paper and put all those scrappy receipts back into the recycling cycle!
PaperFree the service is all about “lean & green” – good for your business and good for the planet. A very important thing to us about PaperFree, the company behind the service, is that it itself be started up, run and of course prosper, in a lean fashion. That’s to say we don’t like waste. Wasted paper, wasted energy, wasted time, wasted resources of any kind.
I tell you this here because we are currently pre-launch, running a Test User Group (TUG), and looking to form a community of like-mindeds – please get in touch with us if you, like us, are keen on lean & green!
If you know already that this is just you all-over, then we have a pretty sweet deal for the 100 founding members, so please sign-up here.
