I decided a few years ago that I wanted to go paperless at home and only save the documents that really needed to be saved (passports, house deed, etc...ie. things you would put in a saftey deposit box or tax slips). Back then I was still using a PC and with no amount of trying could I get the system to work. I had two problems (1) I am a lawyer and so I am used to a fairly sophisticated document management system at work (we use Interwoven which integrates seamlessly into Outlook on an Exchange level) and (2) the scanners that I bought were all painfully slow and prone to problems.
After I converted to Mac, I thought I would try again. I did a bit of research and with some trepidation I decided to blow money on a ScanSnap S510M from Fujitsu. After a few days worth of trying it out, I have concluded that it works beautify. It scans all documents that I have thrown at it perfectly (in colour and black & white), including multiple page bills that come folded, in an envelope. An added bonus is that it does single pass duplex scanning (and detects automatically if it is necessary). All of the scans are clear and crisp and it has true one button operation--connect the scanner to the USB port, load document, press scan button and you instantly have a perfect PDF.
Now that I had the PDFs I tried to figure out how to manage them. I looked around and found a bunch of programs that have a huge amount of flexibility (because of work that is what I gravitated to first) but a complicated workflow. I then stumbled across Yep.
Yep is a great little program and is really quite flexible (and cheap). First of,f let me start by saying what it isn't. It is not a program that lets you store all sorts of document types in all sorts of different ways. All it keeps track of is PDFs. For me, that is all I wanted. I originally wanted to be able to sort everything into folders, but after playing with Yep for a while, I realized that is not really who the program is designed (although you can do this). For my purposes, I created a list of tags that I wanted to use to keep track of my documents (e.g., bank statement, phone bill, deductible receipt, etc...) and scanned and tagged the documents appropriately. What Yep does is create a cloud of documents that is searchable through the tags (it also auto tags each document with the Year and Month it was scanned). While this was not intuitive to me (that is now how my workflow works at work), it turns out to be quite powerful and extremely simple. For me simple and quick were important so that I would actually keep the process up.
The combination is great. The ScanSnap can be set to scan all documents directly into the Yep Pending Documents folder. I then open that folder up periodically and tag everything and then throw them into the Yep Documents folder, with a quick select all and drag and drop (Yep then organizes them into year and month by date of scan for the purposes of drive folders). I can scan about a hundred one or two page documents in about 20 minutes and then tag them all on about 10 minutes. This makes for very efficient record keeping.
A bonus is that Yep works reasonably well with external drives--not perfect but reasonably well. If you creat a directory on an external drive for older documents and then populate that folder with similar folder (sub folder year and then sub sub folder months), after you point Yep to that folder on the external drive, you can just then copy over the docs to the external and then delete the versions on the hard drive using Yep). I wish this was a bit more automated but it really isn't that painful. It also allows me to keep only the last year's documents on my MBP's hard drive to save space.
The real plus is that Yep recognizes and perfectly integrates the documents on the external and then they just vanish the external is not plugged in. This process, frankly, works better than iTunes when using external because there are no broken links--the documents are there when the extrernal is plugged in an not when it isn't.
I just wanted to let people know what worked for me, as I am quite happy with the set up and I have always assumed that most people have a paperless goal like me, but again, like me, most people have not been successful in creating a setup that has an easy to use workflow.
Two other things to note about the combo: (1) both the ScanSnap and Yep allow for OCR scanning. So far, given the documents that I have been scanning, I have not taken advantage of these features due to space considerations. And (2), ScanSnap comes with a true complete copy of Adobe Acrobat Version 8. As I was planning on buying Acrobat Pro Version 9 anyway, this really made purchasing the ScanSnap cheap because it saved me US$300 on the cost of Pro 9.
I am not affiliated with either product, just a happy customer.
After I converted to Mac, I thought I would try again. I did a bit of research and with some trepidation I decided to blow money on a ScanSnap S510M from Fujitsu. After a few days worth of trying it out, I have concluded that it works beautify. It scans all documents that I have thrown at it perfectly (in colour and black & white), including multiple page bills that come folded, in an envelope. An added bonus is that it does single pass duplex scanning (and detects automatically if it is necessary). All of the scans are clear and crisp and it has true one button operation--connect the scanner to the USB port, load document, press scan button and you instantly have a perfect PDF.
Now that I had the PDFs I tried to figure out how to manage them. I looked around and found a bunch of programs that have a huge amount of flexibility (because of work that is what I gravitated to first) but a complicated workflow. I then stumbled across Yep.
Yep is a great little program and is really quite flexible (and cheap). First of,f let me start by saying what it isn't. It is not a program that lets you store all sorts of document types in all sorts of different ways. All it keeps track of is PDFs. For me, that is all I wanted. I originally wanted to be able to sort everything into folders, but after playing with Yep for a while, I realized that is not really who the program is designed (although you can do this). For my purposes, I created a list of tags that I wanted to use to keep track of my documents (e.g., bank statement, phone bill, deductible receipt, etc...) and scanned and tagged the documents appropriately. What Yep does is create a cloud of documents that is searchable through the tags (it also auto tags each document with the Year and Month it was scanned). While this was not intuitive to me (that is now how my workflow works at work), it turns out to be quite powerful and extremely simple. For me simple and quick were important so that I would actually keep the process up.
The combination is great. The ScanSnap can be set to scan all documents directly into the Yep Pending Documents folder. I then open that folder up periodically and tag everything and then throw them into the Yep Documents folder, with a quick select all and drag and drop (Yep then organizes them into year and month by date of scan for the purposes of drive folders). I can scan about a hundred one or two page documents in about 20 minutes and then tag them all on about 10 minutes. This makes for very efficient record keeping.
A bonus is that Yep works reasonably well with external drives--not perfect but reasonably well. If you creat a directory on an external drive for older documents and then populate that folder with similar folder (sub folder year and then sub sub folder months), after you point Yep to that folder on the external drive, you can just then copy over the docs to the external and then delete the versions on the hard drive using Yep). I wish this was a bit more automated but it really isn't that painful. It also allows me to keep only the last year's documents on my MBP's hard drive to save space.
The real plus is that Yep recognizes and perfectly integrates the documents on the external and then they just vanish the external is not plugged in. This process, frankly, works better than iTunes when using external because there are no broken links--the documents are there when the extrernal is plugged in an not when it isn't.
I just wanted to let people know what worked for me, as I am quite happy with the set up and I have always assumed that most people have a paperless goal like me, but again, like me, most people have not been successful in creating a setup that has an easy to use workflow.
Two other things to note about the combo: (1) both the ScanSnap and Yep allow for OCR scanning. So far, given the documents that I have been scanning, I have not taken advantage of these features due to space considerations. And (2), ScanSnap comes with a true complete copy of Adobe Acrobat Version 8. As I was planning on buying Acrobat Pro Version 9 anyway, this really made purchasing the ScanSnap cheap because it saved me US$300 on the cost of Pro 9.
I am not affiliated with either product, just a happy customer.
