With the ever-shrinking price tag on storage volumes, consumers have a variety of choices, including waferlike SD (secure digital) cards, the venerable CD- and DVDROMs, stand-alone hard drives and cloud storage.

Kasey Vejar of Simply Organized offers quick advice: ditch the bulky packaging and invest in a space-saving zip-up sleeved pouch.

Of course, those options bring with them their own problems in terms of data life span and a new desire to hoard all sorts of digital medialike camera phone pictures. In short: electronic clutter.

And then there’s the Neat-Desk.

This elaborate product that sells for about $400 on neat.com is basically a bill/ receipt/document scanner that allows you to digitize all of the important papers you’re keeping and organize them in a proprietary electronic filing system. The scanner has text recognition, too, so you’re not just making images of your paper - you’re converting it for functional use in Excel, Quicken, Turbo Tax and other software.

Keep in mind that data can build up, though. And Neat-Desk manufacturer The Neat Co. recommends having at least 1 GB of available storage for your files.

The ideal users, says spokesman Ashton Tupper, are “Household CEOs/Supermom” types or small business or home office operators.

“If the user is familiar with an Microsoft Office environment or is comfortable using a Web-based app then they will have no problems navigating the Neat software or operating Neat’s hardware and mobile app,” she said.

HomeStyle, Pages 40 on 03/09/2013