We’re met with a special dilemma…we’re constantly travelling so it’s hard to keep tabs on all of our vital documents but there are a lot of circumstances where you need those documents at a moment’s notice. HR keeps a lot of your admin and EER documents on HR Online, but that isn’t much use when you don’t have OpenNet access. My solution is platform- and system-independent and has saved me many, many times.

Basically, I scan in everything and put it on the internet. Here’s how you can do the same. First, get a scanner. I recommend a scanner that you can easily pack in your carry-on luggage, like the super slim and lightweight Canon LIDE 90, which only requires a USB cable (no bulky power cables) but still scans photos perfectly. It works with both Macs and PCs and comes with software that allows you to create multi-page PDFs. Next, find a secure place online to store your documents. I have my own webserver, so I have a password-protected directory where I keep everything. Creating a tag in gmail that is something like ‘vital docs’ would also do the trick. Your level of trust may be different than mine, but generally I think the security is good enough to put my tax and financial information. You might want to try Amazon S3 service if you need a brand name you can trust, though they cost money.

But what do you bother to scan in? I keep (color) copies of all of my passport bio pages, drivers licenses, birth and marriage certificates, vaccination records, my travel orders, all of my vouchers, any tax documents (including 1040s), EERs, receipts, important visas, and anything I feel I might need to pull up from anywhere. Travel orders are the thing that I need to download most often, and the ability to do it from any computer has gotten me out of several jams. I’ll talk in a later post about how to organize and search this information for the right document, but in the meantime you’d better get busy scanning. Macs and some PCs have a “Print to PDF” feature which can also work for documents that don’t need a signature or having a copy is good enough (e.g. IRS 1040s).

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