by Lynette Alice

Created on: April 19, 2008   Last Updated: April 01, 2009

Call it old fashioned but the switch from the traditional banking statements on paper as well as bills is hardly appealing. While the world is fighting to go "green" and reduce paper usage and computers are now considered a safe and competent alternative it is hard to make that leap of faith to changing over again. Why is it that this is the case?

The decision to remain stuck in the past as many put it is far from being based solely on simply being what the kids call old school. My partner and I are small business owners. Each of us come from families that have been in the financial fields or small business owners going back at least three generations each and with that comes experience and knowledge. Most significantly however is the first hand experience of trying to go paperless and the increase of headaches it caused.

We tried being environmentally sound and friendly moving into the the modern times. We switched everything we could to electronic statements. It didn't however take long to realize some important things that made this a terrible move for us personally, which were that we needed to have hard copies of our transactions, and the hard copies we made by printing our on line receipts were worthless when it came to adjudicating errors.

While the concept of going paperless was nice, as pointed out above it wasn't really paperless, it was just different paper. When a bill came in we had to print a copy of it to place in our files should it be necessary for an audit or to dispute an error. The piece of printer paper was usually larger than the paper the bill would have come on to start with which defeated the purpose of switching from a conservation standpoint. We then realized that most businesses charged a fee to get an original copy of a bill over three months old which meant more paper- the folding kind of paper money going out of our pocket, to acquire a bill that would have otherwise been in our possession free of charge each month. In fact almost all businesses only offer a three month billing history on line free of charge. With that limited availability what happens if per se the IRS decides to conduct an audit of four years prior and you don't have those bills to refer to?

From personal experience I can tell you the answer. You will spend a lot of money and time tracking all this information down. Your bank will require a charge of anywhere from one to three dollars per month plus postage to give you a paper copy of old statements. Businesses

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