You Went Paperless For How Much?

You Went Paperless For How Much?

Save MoneyI’ve been meaning to point to this ever since I saw it on Hacker News, but I was finally motivated by DocumentSnap reader drew in this Batch OCR forum post.

Software developer Steve Losh wanted to go paper-free but couldn’t bring himself to drop $400 for a ScanSnap (fair enough), so he decided to put together his own workflow. He outlined it in this fantastic post: Going Paper-Free For $220.

Most of the tools he uses are familiar to long-time DocumentSnap readers such as a Doxie, JotNot, and of course my favorite, Hazel.

I wasn’t familiar with the OCR package that he uses, so I will have to dig into that one more.

All-in-all, great workflow and worth checking out if you are a Mac user. Even if you use a different scanner, you might pick up something useful.

Do you have any money saving tricks that you’ve used in your workflow? Let us know in the comments.

(Photo by Tony Crider)

About the Author

Brooks Duncan helps individuals and small businesses go paperless. He's been an accountant, a software developer, a manager in a very large corporation, and has run DocumentSnap since 2008. You can find Brooks on Twitter at @documentsnap or @brooksduncan. Thanks for stopping by.

Leave a Reply 4 comments

Cathy - August 9, 2011 Reply

Is there a Hazel for pc?

Michelle Muto - August 5, 2011 Reply

Hazel is a must!

Julie K - August 4, 2011 Reply

I still prefer the ScanSnap ($419) with its included Acrobat for batch OCR and file size reduction. But Hazel looks like a great step in his workflow. I use Scanner Pro and Jotnot on the iPhone too.

    Brooks Duncan - August 4, 2011 Reply

    Yep Hazel is pretty great. I've written quite a bit on it in the past, so if you want to see some examples Google “hazel site:documentsnap.com” and you'll get more than you'd ever want to know.

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