Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

Back in November, I held a four-week online class for a group of awesome DocumentSnap readers who wanted to take action on going paperless. I called it the Paperless Action Plan.

The class went really well, and the feedback from that first course was extremely helpful.

I’m happy to announce that I am re-opening the even-better-than-before Paperless Action Plan today.

This project is a four-module class over nine weeks that is focused specifically on helping you create an end-to-end, customized action plan for going paperless, as well as helping you sort out what you need to do to put your plan into action.

Learn more or register here.

This launch is strictly limited to two weeks only (aka, until February 21). After that, the registration will be closed.

What It Is

Great question. The Paperless Action Plan has four action-focused lessons over nine weeks. Why nine weeks? On the weeks between modules I have “office hours” to answer any questions that you may have, and we take a catch-up week.

I know that everyone learns differently, so each week we will have:

• A live teleclass with Q&A time where I cover the material.
• Downloadable PDFs with the important takeaways.
• Recorded MP3 files so you can listen (or re-listen) to the lessons at your convenience.
• Worksheets and handouts so you can put the lessons into action.

There is also a special members-only forum where you can ask me and the other class members questions about your situation, so you can get the best strategy.

At the end of the class, you will have everything you need to put together your own paperless action plan, and know exactly what to do to accomplish it.

Who it Is For

You want to go paperless, but are not sure where to start. You are tired of looking all over the Internet for bits and pieces of information and would like to just have everything consolidated in one place. You need more help than just organizing your documents. You’ve read and read, but haven’t done much to get going.

How do you keep the physical paper in your life under control? How do you organize and keep everything safe? How do you stay on track? How do you convince the people around you that you’re not crazy for doing this?

Who It Is Not For

The Paperless Action Plan won’t review every single scanner, software, and backup option. We will share our experiences and recommendations, but if you are looking for an indepth tutorial on every piece of hardware and software out there, it is probably not what you want.

It is also not for you if you just want to buy it, download the materials, and not do anything with it. No guide or piece of software is going to “go paperless” for you. At the end of the day, you have to actually do the stuff outlined. If you are not at the place to be able to do that yet (and I understand if you are not), this may not be for you.

That’s it! Hopefully speak to you soon on the first call.

Here’s the link again if you are interested in learning more.

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Here are some of our posts from this week in years past.

2011

• Macworld Expo 2011: A First Timer’s Perspective
  Last year was my first time at Macworld (now called Macworld|iWorld). This was my report.

• Unlimited Alternatives For Mozy Escapees
  Mozy made waves last year when it switched from unlimited backup to a usage-based plan.

• Macworld: What Makes SugarSync Better?
  SugarSync has lots of fans here at DocumentSnap, and at Macworld last year I talked to the folks at the booth.

2010

• How To Create Searchable PDFs With The ScanSnap S300M
  Hard to believe, but my first ScanSnap (the ancestor of the ScanSnap S1300) did not come with OCR software. If you have one, here are some options.

• Cool Paperless Setup Video
  Scanning in the kitchen. Ohh yeah.

(Photo by Ayleen Gaspar)

One of my favorite things about writing DocumentSnap is interacting with all the awesome readers. You all do such interesting things.

One such reader is Clare Kumar from Streamlife. Clare is a Professional Organizer, which in itself isn’t too unusual for DocumentSnap readers, but she is also the Organizing Expert for the Marilyn Denis Show, a lifestyle and talk show up here in Canada[1].

Recently Clare was on the show talking about paper organization. Although I go on and on about paperless stuff here on the site, having your physical paper organized can be just as important. Your paperless workflow will go much more smoothly if your paper is in control.

She has some good tips for paper workflow, and some interesting products in her shopping guide. In particular, the Swingline Stack & Shred Shredder looks pretty cool. Apparently it comes in a 60 sheet version too.

To watch Clare’s segment, click here to watch the video.

Any tips or great products you have for controlling physical paper?

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This video on using a highlighter with a Fujitsu ScanSnap to extract keywords is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

The ScanSnap has a cool but (in my opinion) underused feature where you can use a highlighter on some text on a piece of paper, and then ScanSnap Manager will extract that text as keywords and embed them in the PDF file.

I wrote about doing this with Hazel on the Mac before, but here is how the keyword process works in video format. It works on both Mac and Windows with 2009-or-later ScanSnaps like the ScanSnap S1500, S1500M, S1300, or S1100.

By the way, I forgot to mention in the video, this works best on black & white documents. If a document is too busy or colorful, the scanner will get confused and won’t be able to isolate the keywords.

View the video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube. If you are able to, I recommend that you watch it with HD turned on.

(Photo by planetofsuccess.com/blog/)

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On the weekend, I returned from Macworld|iWorld. Usually when I go on these sorts of trips, two things happen afterwards:

1. I end up with a stack of receipts that sit around until I get around to/am forced to scan, organize, and categorize them
2. I end up with a stack of business cards that I get too lazy to deal with, so they sit around until I get around to scanning and organizing them.

This time, I vowed things would be different, and that I would try to handle these things on a more pro-active basis while on the trip itself, so I don’t get hit with a stack of paper afterwards.

Today’s post is about how I dealt with receipts, and a later post will be about business cards.

The Goal

My goal, which I more or less kept to, was to process receipts as I received them. If I could do it while I was still at the restaurant, great. If not, at least that night in the hotel was the goal.

I could have taken a mobile scanner on the trip with me, like the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1100 or the Doxie Go, but I decided to stick with my iPhone and the free app from Expensify.

Expensify

I need to start out by saying that this is not a comprehensive review of Expensify by any means. The service has much more functionality than what I will be touching on, such as submitting expense reports for approval, receiving reimbursements, tracking mileage, linking up with credit cards, and more.

I don’t cover any of that because I don’t do any of it. I will be focusing on using the mobile app to capture and organize receipts, and the web service to download a categorized report.

There are two components to Expensify: the mobile app for iOS, Android, Blackberry, or Palm, and the website.

The mobile apps are free, and the Expensify service itself is free for the basic plan. If you need more features (you can see the plans here) there are more options.

If you want to use “SmartScan” (I will get to that in a minute), you get 10 free scans a month, and then it is .20/scan after that.

Capturing Receipts

Whenever I received a receipt, I would use the Expensify app to take a picture of it. Most of the time, I did it right there at the table.

If you have the feature enabled, the app will upload your receipt to their site, and apply “SmartScan”, which means they will extract the text from the receipt and then attempt to categorize it.

It takes about 10 minutes to complete a receipt. So, what I did was snap the receipt, to capture it, and then later on I went back in to check it out whenever I was hanging out waiting for something.

Organizing Receipts

Once SmartScan is done, you will see a list of scanned expenses on the Expenses tab. You can then tap a receipt to edit the details.

I have been extremely impressed with the quality of the text extraction. I haven’t had any problems with wrong amounts, and the Merchant is right most of the time.

If you have worked at a company and have done any travelling, you will be familiar with the concept of expense reports. That is how Expensify works too. You create a Report, and then attach your expenses to that report.

You can do all this on the mobile app, or on their website because everything is all synced up.[1]

When you are back at your computer, you can log into the website and attach and process any additional receipts. Here I am using the website to SmartScan a cocktail that I had charged to my room in the hotel bar.[2]

Exporting Your Expense Report

When I returned home, all my expenses were already categorized and scanned. I could Submit the report (to… myself), and print a really nice PDF that includes all the categorized expenses, as well as all the receipt images.

Depending on the plan that you have, you can export billable expenses to FreshBooks, export your report to Evernote, export to QuickBooks, and a bunch more.

I found the whole Expensify process very easy. How about you, what do you do for receipts when you are on the road?

(Photo by Random McRandomhead)

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Here are some of our posts from this week in years past.

2011

• How To Set PDF Keywords In Microsoft Windows
  If you want to add keywords to your PDF files on Windows, here are some ways to do it.

• Introducing The Going Paperless Jumpstart Teleseminar
  Last year I had an hour long call where I answered your biggest questions on going paperless. It went pretty well, and the recording is still available.

• Choosing An Online Backup Service
  There are so many choices for online backup services out there, how do you choose which one?

2010

• Carbonite Introduces iPhone App
  It is funny how we expect online backup services to have mobile access now, but it was such a novel thing for Carbonite to do it back then.

(Photo by Ayleen Gaspar)

Beginning with the ScanSnap S1100 and later with a software update for other ScanSnap models, Fujitsu has provided Evernote integration built into ScanSnap Manager.

This works well, but perceptive ScanSnappers may have noticed something strange: there are two different settings for enabling searchable PDFs (aka Optical Character Recognition, or OCR). Why on earth would they do this?

Well, I can’t answer the why, but I can at least shed some light on what the different settings do, as far as I can figure out.

The OCR Settings

To access your ScanSnap Manager Profiles, right-click on the ScanSnap icon on your Dock (Mac) or System Tray (Windows). Choose Settings or Scan Button Settings, depending on your OS.

Application Tab

On the Application tab, when you have one of the Scan To Evernote applications selected, there is an Application Settings… button.

When you press it, you will see there is a Convert to Searchable PDF checkbox. That is setting #1.

File option Tab

When you go to the File option tab of your ScanSnap Manager profile, you will see there is also a Convert to Searchable PDF checkbox. That is setting #2.

So, What Is The Difference?

Before getting into the difference, I do need to point out one quirk of the way that ScanSnap Manager Evernote profiles work.

When you scan, it will upload your document (or image) to Evernote, but it will also save the PDF in the location specified on the Save tab.[1]

As far as I can tell, here is how it works:

• If you only check the Application tab checkbox, the file that is uploaded to Evernote is searchable, but the file that is saved to the folder specified on the Save tab is not searchable.
• If you do not check the Application tab checkbox but do check the File option tab checkbox, the file that is uploaded is searchable, and the file that is saved to the Save tab is searchable.
• If you check neither checkbox, the PDF that is uploaded to Evernote and the PDF that is saved to the Save tab location are not searchable. At that point, what happends depends on your status as an Evernote Premium customer.

So there you go, mystery solved. Either way, being able to scan to Evernote is a great feature, and I’m glad Fujitsu opened it up to all 2009-and-later ScanSnaps. Thanks to user Leothe3rd from the Evernote forum for the inspiration for this blog post.

This video on redacting sensitive text with PDFPen is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

In the spirit of full disclosure, the subject for this video was ripped off from an ad that Katie Floyd did on the Mac Power Users podcast.

If you have sensitive text in a PDF that you don’t want someone to see (think account numbers, amounts, names), many people just use an annotation tool to put a rectangle over it.

The problem with this approach is that it is not actually removing the text from the PDF, it is just covering it up. If someone gets the document, they can get at the text “behind” the image.

This video uses PDFPen’s great redact tool to remove all evidence of a piece of text from a PDF. You can even remove all instances of text with one command.

View the video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube. If you are able to, I recommend that you watch it with HD turned on.

Oh, and apologies to the Boston Bruins fans out there. All in good fun.

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I have written about ways to electronically put your signature on a PDF quite a few times (for example, using PDFPen or in Preview), but they have all been on the Mac. Today it is Windows’ turn.[1]

The latest version of Adobe Reader X has added the ability to drop your signature into a PDF. Previously, you needed the rather-expensive Acrobat X for this. Here is how it works:

Go Into Signature Mode

When you have your PDF loaded, the first thing you want to do is click the Sign button in the upper-right corner of Acrobat Reader.

If you don’t have a Sign button, you are probably using an older version of Reader. Head on over to Adobe’s site and grab Acrobat Reader X.

When you click the Sign button, you will now have three (ok, four, but we will deal with the fourth later) options:

1. Add Text
2. Place Signature
3. Finalize Changes

Add Your Signature

In our case, we want to add our signature, so we will hit Place Signature.

Once you do this, a pop-up window comes up with instructions. Like most of these types of applications, you will need to write your signature on a piece of paper and then scan it in or take a picture of it with a camera or mobile device.

In this example, I used TurboScan on my iPhone to take a picture and then transferred it to my Windows machine.

Once you have your signature file on your computer, select it and hit Accept

Place, Resize, and Finalize

Once your have added your signature, you move the image to where you want it, and then drag the sides to size it.

When everything looks just right, click on Finalize on the right-side of the Window, and it will check with you to make sure that you want to embed your signature in the PDF. Once you click Finalize Changes, it will save a new signed PDF that you can send out.

Send For Signature?

You may have noticed earlier that aside from the three options under Sign Now, there was a fourth option with a Send For Signature button.

All this functionality came about because Adobe acquired EchoSign, an electronic signature company.

If you want to have a more sophisticated signing workflow where the PDF is securely sent to the recipient and the signatures are tracked, you can click that button and try it out. That’s a topic for another blog post though.

All in all, Acrobat Reader X’s signature functionality works well, and it is nice to have this in a free tool that you probably already have.

Do you have another way that you “sign” documents on Windows? Let us know in the comments how it is working for you.

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Here are some of our posts from this week in years past.

2011

• How To Find PDFs That Are Not Searchable
  If you want to find the PDFs on your computer that have not been OCR’ed here is how to do it.

• Reader Story: Accessing Documents On The Go
  This was the first of the popular reader stories series staring Brandon Smith from Oregon.

• Can You Read A Book In A Browser?
  Interesting how far e-Reading has come just in the last year. This was before the Kindle Cloud Reader.

2010

• How To Encrypt Evernote On Microsoft Windows

• How To Encrypt Evernote On Mac OSX
  Encrypting your data on Evernote is a common concern. Here are some things you can do.

• Windows 7 Update For Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 and S500 Is Now Available
  When Windows 7 came out, there were some issues with Fujitsu ScanSnaps. Eventually, they were cleared up with some software patches.

(Photo by Ayleen Gaspar)