PaperStackYou scanned it. It's in the app, searchable, backed up. Can the paper go in the recycling now? For most of what comes through your door, the honest answer is: probably, eventually, but not today, and not because the scan might be wrong.
The two different questions hiding in "do I need to keep this?"
"Do I need to keep this" is really two separate questions. One is legal or contractual: does some authority, contract, or warranty require you to produce the original later? The other is practical: do you trust the scan enough to never want the original again? Most scan-and-shred advice only answers the second question. PaperStack is built around not needing a confident answer to either one before you decide what to do with the paper.
What tends to need the original
Rules vary by document type, by country, and by your own situation, so treat this as a starting point for your own judgment, not legal advice. A few categories where keeping the physical original is the safer default:
- Anything with a wet-ink or notarized signature (contracts, deeds, wills, some notarized forms), where a copy may not carry the same legal weight as the original.
- Tax-relevant documents (receipts, invoices, statements) for as long as your local retention rules require, since a scan is usually accepted as a working copy but tax authorities can still ask for the original in specific cases.
- Warranties and certificates that reference a physical item, in case a manufacturer or insurer wants to see the original stamp, hologram, or seal.
- Anything you'd need in an original, physical form for a specific bureaucratic process (property titles, ID documents, certain government correspondence), where the process itself, not the content, determines whether a copy is accepted.
Outside of these categories, most everyday paper (delivery notes, product manuals, expired insurance letters, old pay slips once you no longer need them for anything specific) is safe to let go of once it's scanned, if you're comfortable with that.
Why "keep it anyway" is still a reasonable default
Most scanning advice skips this part: even when you don't strictly need the original, there's a real cost to being wrong about that, and almost no cost to keeping a labeled box of paper you rarely open. A scan that looked fine when you filed it can turn out to be missing a page, have a smudged date, or simply not be the version an official wants. If the original is gone, you can't fix that the way you'd fix a filing mistake. It's a decision you can't undo.
That's the whole idea behind PaperStack's box model: you don't have to get the "keep or shred" decision right at scan time, for every document, under time pressure. Scan the whole stack, box it as-is, and let the digital index carry the day-to-day searching. The box only matters again on the rare occasion something genuinely needs the original, and when that happens, you're searching one labeled container instead of a house.
A simple way to think about it
If a document is expensive, hard, or legally uncertain to replace, box it and forget about it. The storage cost of a folder of paper is close to nothing compared to the cost of needing an original you don't have. If it's cheap and easy to replace or simply doesn't matter once it's been read, let the scan be the only copy you keep, on your own judgment. PaperStack's job is to make the first choice safe by default, not to force you to decide correctly every time.