Ebooks

August: Go paperless. With all the technology that's available to us, organizations of all kinds are discovering the benefits of trading paper copies for electronic documents – and community associations are no different. Saving trees and saving on the costs of paper and ink are just the obvious reasons to consider making all board business and homeowner communications electronic. The transition will also increase efficiency by allowing you to easily search for documents and quickly send them to whoever needs them. Help the environment and save your community money – go paperless! Here are three quick ways to get there: • Association law can make going paperless tricky by requiring that hard copies of certain documents be mailed in many instances. If your state allows you to pass a resolution to allow owners to opt for electronic communication, what are you waiting for? Give your owners the chance to sign up! • Think about whether you really need a hard copy of your complete financial statements each month, or of your board meeting report. With the rapidly lowering cost of technology, even if your association purchases basic tablets to lend out to board members while they are in office to use for viewing association documents, you will probably save money in the long run with the printing you won't do. • Lastly, do your board members have boxes of files gathering dust in their basements or garages? Or does your management company charge you a fee for storing files that no one has looked at in decades? Not everything needs to be saved, and things that do can just as easily be scanned, which allows you to actually find the files when you need them. Take the time to go through these boxes: determine what you are not legally obligated to keep, scan everything you may need, and recycle what you can. — Lea Marcou, CMCA®, AMS®, PCAM® Community Association Manager Associa Chicagoland

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