As we’ve mentioned during the past month, organizing your documents in the year before you get to tax time can make the difference between paying what you owe, or spending more money and time than necessary during tax time.

No one likes to wield around the accordion files of receipts, paperwork & documents to the accountant, so one of the quickest ways to save time & money is with your scanner, believe it or not! Scan in all your pertinent tax deductible items and save them in monthly files, much in the way you’d do in the physical form. When tax time rolls around, you can very simply upload to a secure files storage site like Dropbox & share your password protected link.

“Different people have different needs for what needs to be kept in physical form, and different states have different laws for what they will accept as proof for tax purposes,” says Erin Doland, editor of the home organization blog Unclutterer in a recent interview:

“So I recommend you acquaint yourself with what is right for you and your situation. That might mean picking up the phone and calling your accountant or talking to a tax lawyer before you shred anything.”

“And I recommend that if you do keep something in physical form, that you actually scan it too. If your house were to go up in flames, it would at least be nice to have a copy out in the cloud of whatever it was that was important enough for you to keep in physical form.”

Items like receipts, bank and credit card statements and any non-sensitive memos important to documenting your tax year can very easily be scanned, documented and uploaded, freeing your home of space and clutter & making your account actually happy to work with you!