Going paperless…seems kind of like nirvana doesn’t it?
Haven’t we been talking about paperless for years now?
Less Paper = More Trees
But I’m still complaining about my astronomical copier bill and my paper bill and my storage room bill for all my old files. Not only do I want to save money, but I’d like to save some trees too. At CloseTrak, we do recycle and we try to be “green” where we can. I can handle that we don’t have flying cars yet, or even that we can’t transport people like they do on Star Trek – but we really should be able to do real estate closings without paper.
I went back to school in 2000 and earned a degree in Electronic Commerce. The Internet was still a pup back then, it was a novel thing to buy a back from a website. As one of my class projects, I wrote about electronic signatures – the federal legislation had already been passed at that time – so it was only a matter of time before we all just signed those electronic pads like we do for credit cards and whammo – the closing is done. I guess in hindsight maybe that’s a good thing – can you imagine how much worse the subprime debacle would’ve been if people could have signed documents electronically? That would have added a lot of velocity to an already out of control process. Whew.
Well, it’s 2011 and to my knowledge, we won’t be doing any paperless closings this year. One big hurdle is a county register in Tennessee cannot legally record a document that has been signed electronically. At least in Mississippi, they are trying to pass legislation to allow electronic signatures (bill, SB 2149, introduced by Sen. Joey Fillingane, R-Sumrall).
Nonetheless, even though we can’t do a paperless closing yet, that has not stopped us at CloseTrak from trying to use less paper.
Many thanks to the CloseTrak staff on that front, because over the years we have tried every new whiz bang paperless solution that came along. We have kissed a lot of frogs that turned out to be toads. But, alas, we think we finally have a solution – Dropbox. I have been using it personally for about a year and I love it. No longer do I have to carry paper files home, or a jump drive, or remote into my work computer to access a document. I pretty much have access to all of my documents on my iPhone.
Dropbox does not tout itself as a paperless solution, but rather a cloud storage solution that allows you to share digital files easily and keep your computers in sync. Since we get most documents in a digital format, we forgo printing them and instead we just store them on Dropbox and they’re instantly available to the entire office. It serves as our digital filing cabinet. And a unique feature about Dropbox (vs. some other online storage solutions) is that you can still have access to your documents even without internet access. It stores them on your local machine as well as in the cloud. Awesome.
If you are trying to use less paper in your work, I recommend Dropbox – come on by anytime if you have any questions on how to use it, but the website has some great tutorials on it. And if you want to sign up for your free account – you can follow this link and CloseTrak gets a couple extra megs of storage.