Contracts, magazines, proposals and meeting notes can take a lot of paper.  In honor of earth day, here are five easy steps you can take to minimize the amount of wedding planning paper you accumulate.

1. First, things first, request wedding paperwork electronically. Once you decide on your wedding vendor, ask for your proposal, agreement, invoices, and inspiration boards electronically. Once everyone is on board, remember to back everything up. We use Carbonite and Time Machine to back up our work.

2. Cut out the postman. Try to send as much correspondence as you can electronically. If a file is too big to e-mail, consider using a cloud service or a zip file.  We use DropBox, but you can use other services likeYouSendIt or SugarSync.

3. Scan the wedding documents you have already received. If you have already started your wedding planning and you have some paper documents in your possession, consider scanning the documents and save them on your computer. Again, remember to back up your documents.

4. Reuse the documents you print. I prefer to receive my documents electronically, but my eyesight is atrocious. So, I find myself printing out the electronic documents I receive so that I can read them carefully. If you are in the same boat, use the back of your printed documents for notepaper. You can even print on the back of the document to review another document. This practice will not only save you paper, it will save you money.

5. Use a cloud-based app to manage your wedding receipts. We like OneReceipt because it allows us to manage our paper receipts and our receipts from on-line stores, such as Amazon or Gilt.

6. Go digital with your wedding magazines. Instead of purchasing the print version of your wedding magazines, consider purchasing the digital versions on your tablet. Some of the digital magazines allow you to bookmark pages, highlight sentences and give you little extras like video tutorials. If your favorite magazine isn’t available on your table, do a little research – you might find the e-magazine version.

7. Practice Rip and Read. If you must read the printed copies of your wedding magazines, practice “rip and read.” Rip out the articles and/or pictures you think you will refer to again. Then, recycle the rest of the magazine. You can take it one step further by scanning the article – Once the article is scanned, you can recycle the paper copy too.

8. Every piece of paper you receive should have a home. To minimize the paper clutter in our office, we keep the following bins – “To Pay,” “To Scan,” “To Recycle,” and the trash can. At the end of each business day, we do our best to empty those bins.

Best of luck, happy Wedding Planning and happy Earth Day!

Love & Soul Always, Kay

(Photo: Shutterstock, Inc.)