Scan my receipts, baby!

September 24, 2006 12:43 PM

What software should I use to archive/organize scans of personal finance information?

A lot of people I know keep exhaustive paper records -- receipts, balance statements, pay stubs, bills, etc. I'm young and relatively mobile, and would rather have digital records than a filing cabinet full of paper to move around.

Beyond the simple (plain b&w scans with descriptive filenames), the ridiculous-overkill (Kofax and its ilk) and the expensive/limited (NeatReceipts), what software is out there for small-scale document management, particularly in a personal finance context? I'd like to be able to scan all my documents into one place and have them OCRed (or at least tagged by type, date, etc) and searchable. Bonus points for OS X/linux software, or Windows software that isn't tied to specific, non-OS-X-supported hardware that I can run in Parallels. Integration with GNUCash also a plus, although I've already googled for projects related to GNUCash.

posted by Alterscape to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Adobe Acrobat + Spotlight?

Acrobat isn't cheap, but I already have Adobe CS, and it works great. Dump everything in a folder and tag it with Acrobat (it handles the scanning and OCR)
posted by mphuie at 1:16 PM on September 24, 2006

May not be what you are looking for, but I use Yep.

It's like iPhoto for documents. (No gnucash hookup, but still makes life very manageable - and helps me get my paper docs all packed away)
posted by zerokey at 3:32 PM on September 24, 2006 [2 favorites has favorites]

Yep is a very good program, however I still prefer my vertical file.
posted by psyward at 3:34 PM on September 24, 2006