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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1. Paperless Receipts
2. Put Receipts (and Business Cards) In Your Shoeboxed
3. Shoeboxed Review – Receipts, Business Cards, And Documents In The Cloud

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.

Related posts:

1. ScanSnap + Evernote = Chocolate + Peanut Butter
2. OCR Your ScanSnap PDF Before Sending It To Evernote
3. How To Scan To Lucion FileCenter With The Fujitsu ScanSnap

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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Related posts:

1. Video: Use PDFPen To Stamp Your Signature On A Document
2. Making Acrobat OCR’ed PDFs Smaller With Formatted Text & Graphics
3. Use A Highlighter With A ScanSnap S1500 To Choose Searchable Text

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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Related posts:

1. Use Adobe Acrobat To Create A Digital Signature Stamp
2. RightSignature lets you sign documents online
3. How To Set PDF Keywords In Microsoft Windows

There are two things that you need to know about this video:

1. The tip itself is completely ripped off from this CNET article by Ed Rhee
2. It could really apply to SugarSync, not just Dropbox, or any other folder on your computer.

If you have a Windows folder that you are constantly copying documents to, you can add it to your Send To menu for quick right-click access. This video shows you how.

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 mikes rite)

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Related posts:

1. Video: Find All PDFs On Your Windows Computer
2. Video: Use And Disable The ScanSnap Quick Menu
3. Video: Use Windows 7 Snap To Compare Documents

You’ve probably heard of sync software like Dropbox or SugarSync, but might not be sure how they work or what exactly they can do for you.

Hopefully, this video will help. I go through some scenarios where sync can help you go paperless, and some things to watch out for.

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 eggy_)

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Related posts:

1. Video: Password Protect PDFs On The Mac
2. Video: Find All PDFs On Your Windows Computer
3. Video: Use PDFPen To Stamp Your Signature On A Document

This video on Evernote keyboard shortcuts is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

If you use [Evernote][evernote], you owe it to yourself to learn these keyboard shortcuts. They’ll make things go much, much faster. I especially love the search one.

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.

Join the forum discussion on this post

Related posts:

1. Video: How To Use Evernote Import Folder To Automatically Add Files
2. Video: Export From Evernote
3. Video: How To View Evernote PDFs As Attachments

Over on the Acrobat for Legal Professionals blog, Rick Borstein has what looks like a really useful tutorial for using Acrobat to create a big searchable PDF from an email archive.

Acrobat X includes an email archiving feature (see video for demo) which allows you to convert an entire folder of email into a single, searchable PDF, complete with attachments. I previously wrote about this feature in my post “Creating Email Portfolios for Small EDD Productions”.

Owning neither Windows Acrobat nor Outlook I can’t try this trick myself, but hopefully it will help some of you.

Do you archive email to PDF? How do you do it?

Related posts:

1. Use Acrobat Batch Processing To OCR Your PDFs Easily
2. Abbyy Finereader and Adobe Acrobat – Why Does Fujitsu Include Both?
3. Use Adobe Acrobat To Add Pages To An Existing Document

There are a bunch of ways to add your signature to a document without printing it, but my favorite is using PDFPen by Smile Software. This video shows you how to do it easily.

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.

Join the forum discussion on this post

Related posts:

1. Use Adobe Acrobat To Create A Digital Signature Stamp
2. Video: Password Protect PDFs On The Mac
3. Video: Find All PDFs On Your Windows Computer

If you know someone who is (mostly) paperless, perhaps they can benefit from some productivity software to take them to the next level.

Unfortunately, these are mostly Mac tools. This is one area (don’t be a hater!) where the Mac has a slight edge on the PC.

Hazel

• Who is it for?: Mac users who want to automate as much as possible on their computer.
• Where can I buy it?
  Noodlesoft

TextExpander

• Who is it for?: Mac users who want to dramatically speed up entering recurring bits of text (for example, filenames for electronic documents).
• Where can I buy it?
  Smile Software

Breevy

• Who is it for?: Windows users who want to dramatically speed up entering recurring bits of text (for example, filenames for electronic documents), or TextExpander users who want to be able to sync their snippets to a Windows machine.
• Where can I buy it?
  16 Software

PDFPen

• Who is it for?: Mac users who want be able to edit PDFs, add signatures, perform OCR, and do pretty much everything else with a PDF without Acrobat’s crazy price tag.
• Where can I buy it?
  Smile Software

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