Is There an App To Where I Scan and Store All Personal Business Papers,

July 27, 2019 7:51 AM

I want to create more space around my home and less papers piles. What apps are out there where I can scan/enter items like pay stubs, paper bills, invoices, etc?
posted by goalyeehah to Technology (16 answers total)

At the most basic level, Google Drive on a phone has a 'Scan' option. It's how I submit my work receipts
posted by scruss at 8:16 AM on July 27, 2019

I use Evernote for this; all the similar apps (OneNote, Google Keep etc etc) do this and it's easy with a phone camera. I don't know if the others do what Evernote does - photos are OCR-scanned and when you search for a text string it also searches in photos.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:17 AM on July 27, 2019 [6 favorites]

The dropbox app has a great scanning option. I use that for normal paperwork. For receipts I just use waveapps.com app because it does the OCR stuff for you and renames with titles with relevant info. Although it is a (free) book keeping app, I stopped using it for that a long time ago and now just use it to store my receipts and download them at the end of the year for an archive.
posted by Brockles at 8:45 AM on July 27, 2019

I've had apps for this, but turns out I kinda just end up using the file system. I scan shit to PDF and put them in meaningful folders with meaningful names, and then it's just there without needing another app or a proprietary DB or any of that additional complication.

Increasingly, I use a scanning app on my phone instead of my flatbed. Lots of options there.
posted by uberchet at 9:06 AM on July 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

TL;DR summary: scanning apps come and go and it doesn't matter as long as it exports to PDF; email the PDFs to yourself and give some thought to metadata you are going to include in email or subject line.

I've struggled with this, having iterated through about four different applications over the last ten years: Card Munch (acquired by Linked In, RIP); Evernote; Microsoft Office Lens; Adobe Scan. Switching between apps has largely been driven by acquisitions, product roadmaps changing, and business models changing. The scanning part is fairly commoditized technology at this point, the issue is where the documents go after you scan them and whether there is a pay model or not. Some of these providers do the freemium model where you can store up to a certain amount for free and they you hit a pay tier (Evernote, for example). Here is my best advice for riding out the inevitable change of software companies coming and going:

- Make sure that whatever you use to scan can export PDF via email

- If you are using something like gmail with a very large storage capacity and a great search engine, that is the most flexible place to store the PDFs; even if your scanning app is auto storing for you, get in the habit of just forwarding the resulting PDF to gmail (or whatever your mail app is). I had the experience this year of using this feature to pull up medication lists and power-of-attorney docs in a variety of hospital settings and it saved me a lot of heartache ("why yes mr. administrator person, I've got my POA right here on my phone." and "excuse me surgery check-in nurse, that doesn't look right, let me show you the current list of medications my mom is on.")

- I haven't had any real luck with OCR; you are going to end up with embedded images in your PDFs. To save your future self from opening a lot of PDFs to figure out what you scanned, you need to decide now what kind of meta data you are going to consistently store with the email.

- If you are going to have some consistent categories (you mentioned pay stubs, invoices, bills), and are using gmail, you can use the "+" nomenclature in the email address to trigger a rule to label the incoming email, making it easier to search for later. E.g. you can email [e-mail] and it will still get to yourmailaddress; gmail will ignore the stuff after the plus symbol for delivery, but you could then set up a filter to tag those emails with a "paystub" label. There are plenty of tutorials on how to do this trick and other things like it with gmail.
posted by kovacs at 9:09 AM on July 27, 2019 [4 favorites]

Readdle Scanner Pro works well - it has good edge recognition and corrects perspective and shadows. You can easily do multi page docs. You can auto save PDFs (or jpgs, though I don’t use that) to whatever cloud storage you use.
posted by Kriesa at 11:21 AM on July 27, 2019

Why do y'all use phone apps to scan documents and not simply run them through a scanner?
posted by JimN2TAW at 11:53 AM on July 27, 2019

I use Evernote for this, although if I was starting over today I might use Microsoft OneNote instead. There was a period of time where it looked like Evernote was on the skids (though they seem to have hung on). OneNote currently has a more generous free plan than Evernote. There are lots of "Evernote vs. OneNote" punchlist articles if you want to read about which has what feature.

Dropbox also has a mobile scanning feature built into their smartphone app that's pretty good, at least on par with Evernote's. It might be preferable if you want file-based organization (each scanned item is in a separate file) rather than the somewhat opaque/proprietary database-like scheme of Evernote (which relies mostly on full-text search and tagging).

As for "why a mobile app and not a scanner"... I used to use a scanner heavily, and still own one, but I find that using a mobile app to 'scan' items when I'm out in the world is more convenient than bringing the paper back to my desk at home and scanning en masse. The paper had a tendency to pile up until I sat down to deal with it, and was generally a painful process. Snapping a photo of an invoice/receipt/whatever with a phone app (and then throwing the thing away), even if the total amount of time spent per item is higher than batch-scanning, is just easier to fit into my life.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:27 PM on July 27, 2019

Why do y'all use phone apps to scan documents and not simply run them through a scanner?

Because a scanner is ponderous and slow and tethered and an app is on my phone in my bathrobe pocket when I'm standing in my front hall opening mail and bills naked.

What apps are out there where I can scan/enter items like pay stubs, paper bills, invoices, etc?

Honestly, I treat these as different needs that happen to be met with the same technology. Pay stubs, paper bills and electronic invoices I scan on my phone or email to Wave for very basic free accounting and budgeting. (Expenses at the end of the year: MAGIC.) Most people in the US use Mint.

For other paper shit I use Dropbox.
posted by DarlingBri at 12:34 PM on July 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

Yep, if you already use Dropbox or OneDrive or Evernote or Google Drive for household stuff, just scan to PDF (I use the scanners at my job) and store in your already existing organizational structure. Another benefit is you can selectively share folders with partner or other household members. And try to get as much as possible as PDF in the first place (pay stubs, bills, statements all offer this option).
posted by matildaben at 1:04 PM on July 27, 2019

For those that want a scanner option, I recently got a Doxie WiFi enabled scanner to reduce paper clutter and it's amazing. I also have TinyScan as a phone app, but the scanner is less time consuming. The Doxie is rechargable and small so it's portable and it's been really fun getting a bunch of papers out of my house.
posted by crunchy potato at 1:34 PM on July 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

Google Drive only allows scanning from Android phones. You can't scan directly on an iPhone.
posted by soelo at 2:14 PM on July 27, 2019

If you're on a Mac, you can do what I do. Scan using a Scansnap 1300 (double-sided, sheet fed scanner) into an OCR'd PDF. The PDF then gets reviewed by Hazel, which renames it based on the date and the contents of the file (so the cell phone bill becomes "2019-07-ATT bill.pdf" because it recognizes the account number on the bill). Finally, the PDF gets dumped into DevonThink which files it using some kind of magic that groups it with all the similar bills.
posted by neilbert at 5:22 PM on July 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

What level of tech are you comfortable with? There's Paperless, or if you want something a little more "business-ish", Mayan EDMS, but you'll need a server to run those on.
posted by jordemort at 6:57 PM on July 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

I use Scanbot on my iPhone which saves directly into my iCloud Drive. It looks like they also have an Android version.
posted by ukdanae at 1:07 AM on July 28, 2019

You don't need most of it. Most pay stubs have both current and Year To Date fields. Loot at it briefly, maybe tuck it in your wallet, throw away the old one.
Same with bills, which are mostly online. Maybe generate a year-end list of charges and payments to keep digitally.
Scan receipts if there's a warranty, or get them by email.

Invoices and payment records for your businesses do need to be filed, many good ideas above.
posted by theora55 at 6:13 PM on July 28, 2019