About

Who Are We?

Founder Simon Ellis and his team first got involved in digital document management at the turn of the century.

Simon is an entrepreneur who has successfully built and run a number of companies in the document management space and CTO Marcus Holmes (MBA) built one of the first cloud based digital document management platforms used by large UK companies.

Our platforms were designed to help organisations capture, store and retrieve the documents they need to run their businesses efficiently providing fast access to resolve customer enquiries on the spot.

We have taken our years of experience and customer feedback and applied it to personal document management to deliver a platform that’s affordable, secure and intuitive.

Most document management systems need lots of planning and resources to get them fit for purpose.

Everyone thinks differently so we needed a platform that allows people to create their own filing systems with minimal effort.

People also have a need to effortlessly share certain documents with loved ones or professional advisors knowing that the documents are secure and can’t be changed.

A personal archive account provides you with simplicity and flexibility for finding documents and sharing them when needed. People you share with can even add documents for you to see and act on.

Imagine getting notified when someone has read a document you shared with them, or when they add a document for you to see? You can even set reminders against a document using #tags – My insurance is due in a month remind me to look for a quote.

Our Mission: To simplify managing life documents

At work we are forced to comply with established processes which include how we manage documents and how work manages compliance and access to these.

At home we continually postpone, put off, delay, ignore (deny) the need to organise our life documents.

What’s the point I hear you say?

The effort needed today outweighs the benefit because that’s tomorrow (not today).

Until tomorrow arrives and you get mega stressed trying to find a document you urgently need.

Look, we are not asking you to spend a few days sorting your stuff out, let’s be real, you have better things to do. So, do it a small bit at a time.

Find one important document and add it to your personal archive. Do the same tomorrow or even next week. See our personal archive plan here.

OK so there is also the problem with a filing system being that it’s so difficult to remember which file you put a document in to so finding it is a pain.

Personal archive takes all the guesswork out of retrieving or filing things.

We use #tags to describe different attributes of the content of a document.

For example, you can tag all your airplane tickets with #ticket and with the #holiday. You can use the same #holiday on other documents relating to the holidays.

Now you don’t have to ask yourself – where did I put that ticket?

To find your tickets for your holiday, search for #ticket and #holiday together. Simple.

#tags allow you to tag all documents with a similar subject, or type, or origin, or purpose, or whatever. Documents can have as many tags as you like, creating a new tag for a specific purpose is a doddle.

Why not try it with one document? You’ll feel so good you might add a second ? See our personal archive plan here.

Why personal archives?

The inspiration was my brother calling from the USA saying his neighbour in Cambridge had just called him to tell him his house was flooding from a burst pipe.

He could not remember who his insurers were.

We drove two hours to Cambridge to find his policy document so he could call the insurance company to sort things out.

Much has changed since then but for sure remembering who you are with is still a pain.

Your Personal archive plan

Make a promise to yourself not to spend longer than 15 minutes looking for and filing your stuff.

Start with something that may be accessed more than other things.

Preparation

Find one of your insurance policies.

Where is it?

A PDF in your documents on your laptop or in the cloud?
Attached to an email you received when you renewed?
On the providers portal – you’ll need the link and password.

Prepare to file.

Printed in a file – scan or capture with your camera.
Prepare to file – will take no more than 2 minutes.
Create a #insurance tag in your account.
Create a #tag for the item of insurance (#car, #medical, #home)
Just whilst you get the hang of the system and for peace of mind create a saved search (folder) called insurance policies.
- Include the #insurance tag
Upload your PDF and add both #tags to the document.
The policy is now in your account and you can find it via any of the #tags you applied to it

Stop there.

Make 15 minutes tomorrow to do the next policy. And so on

Once you have completed the first category of documents do the same with other categories.

Here are the top three most accessed documents.

Car insurance
Medical Insurance
Home insurance

Subscribe to our managing my life documents email series

Here we will help you gradually get your life documents sorted.

We will also help you establish a list of assets so you can be sure to add supporting documents for them all.

Don’t be one of the people who make up the horrific stats on lost assets listed on our home page.

customer testimonals

My taxes got really complicated in 2020 due to the pandemic. My wife and I had a lot more W2’s and 1099’s than we normally have. And because we were still in the pandemic lockdown, we didn’t want to meet in person with our accountant. The Personal Archive was the perfect solution. Not only could we securely send all the documents, but we could view the audit trail to make sure he looked at each one. This was a much easier and efficient way to do taxes.

Mark

Chicago

My fiancé and I were buying a new home and applying for a mortgage. The number of documents you need for a mortgage are insane: tax returns, W2’s, bank statements, client letters, cancelled checks, all going back years and all with very sensitive personal information. My fiancé and I were each instructed to upload them to the mortgage company’s portal. But we ran into a simple, but potentially fatal problem. He didn’t have any of his documents in digital form. Nor did he have a scanner. So I took them, scanned them, and put them into The Personal Archive. I gave him secure access to them so he could download them onto his computer and then upload them to the portal. And because the mortgage company’s portal sometimes lost documents, we were always able to easily find the document that needed to be reuploaded. The Personal Archive helped us get into our new home. Thanks.

Sandy

McHenry, Illinois

My mother was taken to the hospital after she fell at church. She didn’t have her purse with her, with her insurance cards, so when I got to the emergency room, I was bombarded with questions about her insurance, her medications and other conditions she had. Fortunately, my brother had uploaded her medication list, medical conditions and scans of her Medicare and supplemental insurance cards. He gave me access to those documents through my own account. I was able to log in while at the hospital and get all the information we needed.

Laura

Evergreen Park, Illinois

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