Welcome to the first Tech Talk Tuesday.
Most readers of this blog are self-employed in some fashion. If you are, you probably know that there are hassles that come with being self-employed. One of the biggest is the amount of paper that seems to stack up. Bank accounts, taxes, investments, payrolls, lawyers, receipts, bills, invoices the list goes on. I have found a solution that has made our lives so much easier.
Steps:
1) Go to Amazon and buy a Fujitsu S300M or S1500M. I recommend the S300M unless you have a really out of control paper situation. The 300 does basically everything the 1500 does.
2) Get an Evernote account. It’s free to try, but you’re going to want to upgrade to get the search within documents.
What’s this going to do?
The Fujitsu ScanSnap allows you to 1-button scan directly into Evernote. Evernote allows you to search within all of your documents even if they are just scanned PDFs, as well as tag them however you want.
This is a game-changer for most people. Suddenly instead of having to file things into a file cabinet, and not be able to find them when you need them, you can just search all of your documents.
Here are instructions for the S300M and Evernote on a Mac
Or Scan to Evernote on Windows.
My desk is clear for the first time in years.
About the author...
ddn – who has written 9 posts on ShoeMoney.com.
David is the CTO of ShoeMoney Media Group. He makes the gears turn in opposite directions.
Images provided by ShutterStock
Should I sell my website? 
Movies That Motivate Me 
I Am a Failure 
{ 39 comments… read them below or add one }
*Click*
Just today I was asking myself, “What is the solution to all this paper!” I can’t keep killing trees like this!”
Something like this that can help me stay organised, AND use less paper, is definitely something I’m going to check out.
Great idea thanks for that good advice.
Getting rid of the reams of paper that I may need once a year or so is one thing…being able to get rid of the filing cabinets and quickly find anything is a miracle!
Clever title. When I saw the title in my RSS feed, I thought it is a topic on simple living. Anyway, good tip for scanning all the papers.
But filing is so easy. You just put inside a giant file folder.
PDFing is the best replacement to bulky filing
Very useful tip! Technology is great ain’t it?
@DD
Does Evernote store data in the cloud or does everything sit on your local machine. I get concerned about where my tax docs, contracts, insurance forms, credit card bills, etc. will be sitting.
Thanks.
Evernote gives you the option to create “notebooks” that sync through the cloud, or stay on your local computer.
@tbuck
Cool, thanks.
Thanks for the tips.
I have used Yahoo! Notepad forever cause its tied to my email account and has a bunch of great notes. Evernote is something I haven’t seen before. I am hoping Yahoo! doesn’t shut down their notepad app like everything else they used to operate.
This is a bit of a historic post, and I like the direction. Knowing the inside players at Shoemoney, both Dave and Tigh are incredibly competent people. I have learned a ton from Dave over the years. I like that Shoe delegated this post to David, and we have Tigh showing up in the comments with more important data. Good job guys!
It’s funny because Tigh never responds to Jeremy’s posts
You what this would be awesome for? My kids drawings… they come home with like 20 of them a day, and they ALWAYS end up in my office.
Yep! I have a special folder just for my kids’ artwork. Now it never gets discolored or lost, and I’ll have it forever.
Hey David,
I take it any sheetfed scanner will do the job here? Im looking at :
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Plustek-OpticSlim-Sheetfed-Mobile-Scanner/dp/B000JWIGTG/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&s=officeproduct&qid=1268819384&sr=8-14
That’s selling for £62 elsewhere, which is a big saving on the $240+ price of the Fujitsu.
If it is worth the $150 or whatever to you to have to figure out how to make it work and integrate, I’m sure it will work somehow.
Looks pretty awesome…question though…how big are the files that are scanned in? Evernote lets you do 500MB a month for the premium account…is that enough for a business that has a lot of receipts and invoices and what not?
With the S300M scanner David and I both have, you can set the scan preferences to use with Evernote. So you can by default scan in lower quality, or higher quality depending on what you are doing. So on average, if I scan one piece of paper to pdf, it is about 150kb in normal mode.
I been doing this for a year
Works great but….
1 You need Evernote premium or it wont OCR PDF´s (You can use JPEG)
2 Limits for free evernote edition is ok for about 200 docs a month
3 Old Macmini g4 makes great scan station no need for monitor
4 No you cant use any other scanner Scansnap are expensive but they are the only sheet feed scanners that do work
I LOVE my ScanSnap S510. It’s one of the greatest things I ever bought. I scan everything now — including my kids’ artwork.
Instead of scanning to Evernote, though, I scan to OCR’d PDFs and then let Google Desktop index them. I can’t tag them, but I can do a fulltext search of what’s in them.
Great idea, would be better than all the little notes i have lying around that I lose regularly.
Very good idea! It’s so important to stay organized!
Great idea. Goodbye to paper & composition books.
What an idea. Cool.
Hey this is a really unique and great point of view, thanks for posting this stuff all the time.
nicely done, no paper ,save trees
Great Idea.
I will be use it!
What I like about blog articles is that often they trigger a thought in my head. After that happens, I feel as I must respond hoping it will be pleasant to other people. Since there are numerous personal blogs with many different points of view, they challenge your perception. It’s at these moments when you have vital insignt the rest may not have had, which include the blogger herself/himself. I find myself coming back to your web log mainly because you have plenty of useful insights and you happen to be at this a very long time, which is very inspiring and tells me you know your stuff. Keep sparking ideas in other people!
Cool. It’d be great if I can use Evernote to search comic books. I have lots of scanned and downloaded comic books/graphic novels. I wonder if those can be counted as documents.
I’ve been using both Evernote and OneNote (part of the Microsoft Office suite), trying to figure out which one I like better. They both share many of the same features including the ability to scan. So far, I think OneNote has better clipping capability than Evernote, but Evernote leads in syncing across different computers.
I’m not self-employed, but this is a great tool. I can totally use this. Thanks!
If it can scan and organize 200 documents a month, that sounds good to me. But I’m just an average person with a need to organize his papers. Evernote sounds like a really reliable system if you’re an average person or a small business and medium business owner. But for really large companies, 200 documents a month might not work. But I guess large companies have their own way to file and organize their papers.
I’m a little obsessive-compulsive with papers (including letters and scratch papers), and I always end up keeping too many papers even if I’m supposed to throw them away. All my papers are kept neatly in envelopes and folders by date. But it seems everything (or almost) can now be digitized. All those important documents I keep, and the not-so-important ones, I can now scan them and organize them by using Evernote. Nice. I’ll make sure to get a Fujitsu scanner and an Evernote account one of these days. Thanks for the post, Dave!
I get what you mean. I hold on to my old papers as well, and I have them organized. I always had the option to scan them and store them in my computer — my son keeps telling me to — so a few years ago I decided to let go of half of my “collection”. I had them scanned and kept in a portable hard drive. I still have some of my old documents though.
Thanks! Good advice. I’ll try it.
Looks like the S1300 is out which is a newer version of the s300 so might be worth picking this one up instead.
Awesome! Great idea, will give this a try.=)
Great idea David,
thanks for sharing.
Cheers,
Togrul