How to live without paper documents
One of my hates is the
amount of ‘paperwork’ that falls through my
letterbox. I’m not talking about the junk mail
rubbish which simply gets put straight in to the bin,
but other stuff such as statements, important
letters, bills, the list goes on. Once I’ve processed
everything it all gets stored in my filing cabinet.
In most cases never to be seen or needed again, but
as always the day after you throw it away something
will always crop up which requires that very
document! This got me thinking wouldn’t it be great
if I could somehow reduce the amount of paper
documents I receive and instead store them
electronically? Well this is exactly what I’ve done
and it is working so well that I thought it would be
great to share my solution to the problem with you.
The first stage in the process was to contact
everyone who sent me documents such as statements,
household bills and credit card bills and ask then if
they have the option to receive them either online or
my email. For some they were able to offer either a
web version of the document or a PDF to download.
Where they only offer an online version I simply use
the in built Mac option to print the web page as a
PDF. This still left a lot of paper documents, so my
idea was to consider scanning them so I started doing
my research.
After reading many reviews I found what seemed to be
the perfect scanner for the job. It was the Fujitsu ScanSnap 300M which was
priced around £250. What was great about this
product was most importantly it worked great with
the Mac, it was also portable and could be powered
via USB, it could scan both sides of the document
in full colour at the same time and the final
document produced could be PDF rather than a
simple jpeg image. The ScanSnap definitely lives
up to the reviews and I would have no problem
recommending it to a friend. Once set up, which
incidentally is a breeze to do, you simply tell
the bundled software where to place your scanned
documents and are ready to go. Scanning a document
is as simple as loading the sheet(s) and pressing
a button on the ScanSnap and away it goes. The
software will also straighten the image
automatically if you didn’t load it quite square.
For a while the solution worked fine, I setup a
structure of folders to store my scanned documents
and was happy shredding and disposing of my paper
documents. I then came across a piece of software
which was recommended by Alex Lindsay on the MacBreak Weekly Podcast called
NeatWorks from The Neat Company. The main function
of this software is to provide a database of all
your scanned documents. A sort of iPhoto library
for your documents. What is great is that it works
seamlessly with the ScanSnap and also it indexes
the contents of the scanned documents to make them
searchable. NeatWorks can also be used to scan and
store receipts and business cards. With receipts
it also extracts the products, costs, tax and
dates from the receipt and adds that to the
database for fast and easy retrieval. It will even
extract the data from business cards and create a
new fully populated contact for you in you Mac
address book.
I started worrying about what if I lost the data, may
be a hard disk failure, I forgot to backup or my Mac
got stolen. The solution was to find myself an online
storage service I could trust. Having shopped around
I settled on Mozy, only $4.95 a month gives me
unlimited online storage and the Mac software
works really well and automates the backups for me
so I don’t need to remember to kick them off. The
really great thing is that it also only backups
changes to files. What I mean by this is that it
only uploads the bits that change in a file. So if
you have a 1Gb file which is backed up online to
Mozy, and then you edit that file which changes
just 1Mb of the file, when Mozy next automatically
backs up it will only upload the 1Mb. I also use
Mozy for backing up my Photos.
I’m hoping to automate the workflow further using AppleScript, but that will be another blog post once it’s all in place.
|
|
|
blog comments powered by Disqus