Posts for Tag : office

I opened a bank account yesterday for Energy Emporium. I shopped around a bit, but really for small business banking they are all pretty much the same. The ones I looked at offer electronic banking and bill pay, which is important to me. I hate to write checks. I tell myself that e-bill payments save paper — which it probably does, but really I just hate to write checks.

If I really want to save paper that comes from the bank I need to take the plunge and sign up for electronic statements. I tried this with one credit card account a few years back. I got the email that says “your statement is ready” and I pretty much ignored it like I do with the other hundred emails I probably got that day.

Then I forgot to pay it until it was late and I got late fees and they raised my interest rate. I was very annoyed.

But, I’m going to do it again because it is important to my business that I do what every I can to avoid wasting paper. I’ll set up calendar reminders for when bills need to be paid and use an incoming mail rule that puts all the bank and credit card statements into their own folder.

The other thing I want to be much better about is backing up data. It is great to keep everything electronically, but if a hard disk goes on a computer… you can lose it all. After decades of using personal computers and depending on them for many things, I only bought my first back up hard drive last year.

From my mac, with Leopard, it is really easy to plug in a hard drive via USB and the ‘time machine’ takes over backing things up. That’s helpful.

Ok…no paper statements for The Energy Emporium. Have you chosen electronic statements? Has it worked for you?