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.
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