This is one of the more common New Years Resolution among TechWarriors. Keeping an Electronic copy of your Receipts is both easy , and could potentially save you tons of money. How to get started. Well read on, and I’ll suggest some starting points.
The first thing that you will need is a scanner with an document feeder. Get one that can scan both side of the paper, either with a duplex feeder or one that scans both side of the paper at the same time. I use a Brother MFC-8860DN
The next thing you will need is some kind of filing management software. I know of two that will work. These Are DevonThink and EagleFiler. If you scanner comes with the ability to make pdfs with OCR, then you will need just EagleFiler. DevonThink pro office comes with a scanner management software and OCR to put the text in the image based pdf. DevonThink wants to put things in it’s sparsebundle images. It’s hard to retrieve a file directly without going through DevonThink. With EagleFiler the files are kept in a series of normal directories. You can access the file directly without having to go through the program, just don’t add or remove files without going through EagleFiler.
The next thing you are going to need is some kind of basket, container, or folder to keep the paper receipts until they have been made into an electronic form. Then save the paper until you have made at least one back up copy of the files. Once that is done, you can shred those paper receipts.
The last thing you will need is a plan, a routine for getting that paper into the computer. For me it works like this. At 6pm everyday, I go to my basket in which I drop paper receipts. I fire up DevonThink and start up the import from scanner. If I have more than one receipt I make sure to check the one file per page check box.
Then I load my scanner with the receipts. The ScanSnap can scan a bunch of odd sized paper, so I load it up from the basket. I wait while the ScanSnap scans the paper and files it in DevonThink. I also allow DevonThink to work it’s OCR magic ( available only in the DevonThink Pro and pro office. I drop all these files into my EagleFiler To Import folder. The next time I fire up EagleFiler they will be imported into EagleFiler. I move the folders to the correct folder and then tag the files with the appropriate tags. Then I am done unless you count the entering of the receipts into the financial software.
Someone told me that if you do something 14 times in a row it becomes a habit. Do something like the above workflow 14 times and you will have a good habit.
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This was very helpful information! Thanks
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