Paperless office drowning in paper receipts!

August 17, 2009 9:17 AM

Other than Neat Receipts can you suggest a solution for archiving receipts in an electronic format?

Our office is 99% paperless, and we archive all of our documents as PDFs on an OS X server, with a folder structure that works for us.

The breakdown has been with receipts. When we started, we purchased two seats of Neat Receipts for OS X and the scanners to go with them. The software has been buggy, requires a re-download of the entire application every time they update and we've spoken to Neat Receipts so many times that I'm on a first name basis with some of their techs.

That said, can you suggest another system for archiving receipts? It doesn't need to be specifically for receipts, and I'm not worried about accessing them except in a worst-case scenario of an audit or similar, because we're already tracking all of these expenses in QuickBooks.

The ideal solution would be OS X or network-based (we can run a web app internally if that helps) and allow us to name the receipt with vendor name and date without too much of a hassle, OCR is nice but not necessary.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

posted by rollo tomassi to work & money (7 comments total)

Do you have a scanner that can email or save in PDF (most recently made scanners can)? You can use that and simply rename the file name and edit the metadata as needed.
posted by Burhanistan at 9:44 AM on August 17

Exactly as Burhanistan said. If you've got a scanner, use that and rename the file as needed. If you need a scanner, Fuji ScanSnaps are highly recommended. I have the S300M and it works perfectly for my needs. The bigger models come with OCR software, but do some research because I've heard that Fuji's just released a new ScanSnap that comes with Abbyy FineReader, which you might prefer over the Acrobat software that ships with the older models.

Another thing you could try is scanning in batches and using an app like Name Changer to sequentially name them.
posted by LuckySeven~ at 10:07 AM on August 17

I archive all scanned documents with Evernote... it's a pretty simple interface and can do what you need it to, I think.
posted by mateuslee at 10:09 AM on August 17

I've been using Paperless. I don't think it has any particular server-related capabilities, and its attempts at OCR are not worth the trouble (to put it kindly). It acts as a combo of a very simple spreadsheet and a scanned-document manager: effectively, each scan is associated with a line in your spreadsheet.

What's good about this (at least for me) is that it gets me in the habit of scanning the receipts and typing in the particulars as I go, rather than trying to wade through all the receipts of the past year some time perilously close to April 15. I am also certain that I am tracking more receipts than I used to.
posted by adamrice at 10:22 AM on August 17

DevonThink Pro Office + Fujitsu ScanSnap. DevonThink's workflow with ScanSnap is very easy and quick, including the file renaming mentioned by the OP. End result is a searchable PDF+RTF document.
posted by webhund at 10:32 AM on August 17

I recently bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap (which is pretty much the MOST AWESOME THING EVER) and set it up to scan to EverNote. I then tag the receipts in EverNote by date, payee, and category. This won't hook the receipts directly to your accounting system, though.
posted by Jacqueline at 4:48 PM on August 17

Thanks for all the suggestions. We're going to give paperless a shot, I ordered a scanner they approve and it will show up tomorrow thanks to Amazon Prime. I'll come back and mark what worked best.
posted by rollo tomassi at 6:35 PM on August 17