Households describe the work as it actually happened.

I did the Starter Sort with my late husband's employment records. Before the session, I had no idea how many letters I actually had from different employers — it turned out to be three separate stacks from different periods. After two hours they were in one labelled folder with a list of what was missing. The summary sheet was the most useful part because my children could read it without needing me to explain everything.

We did the Household Records Programme. I was a bit uncertain about the pace initially — eight weeks felt long — but it actually suited us well because the fortnightly spacing gave us time to think about each area before the next session. The document map at the end was genuinely useful. My one comment is that some categories took a little less time than the session allowed, which left some gaps in the schedule. Not a real problem.

My mother is 71 and the Two-Generation Programme was recommended to us by a family friend. We completed it in April and May this year. What I hadn't expected was how useful the joint walkthrough session would be — my mother and I sat together with the coordinator and walked through both sets of papers. My mother had not known where some of her own documents were, and the session sorted that out calmly. The orientation document is now kept with each set.

I did the Starter Sort to try out the service before signing up for the full programme. I chose membership and pension correspondence as the category because that is where most of my confusion was. The coordinator was methodical — she went through each letter individually, dated it, noted what it was and what action it might have required. Two things were identified as missing. The open-questions register was a list of six items for my financial planner.

My parents are both retired civil servants and between them they had six boxes of papers in no particular order. The Household Records Programme was the right starting point for them. The coordinator was patient with my father, who wanted to explain the history of every document. That patience actually helped, because his explanations identified a category that the standard template does not cover — gratuity correspondence — which was then treated as its own section.

We live outside Kota Kinabalu and were not sure whether Nestward would travel to us. They did, and the travel arrangement was discussed upfront with no surprise charges. Three sessions at our home, covering civil documents and land title correspondence — two areas that had caused us considerable stress simply because the papers were not accessible. They now are.