This is Part 1 of a 2 part series about SmartVault. Part 2 outlines how to use SmartVault with Quickbooks and the Fujitsu ScanSnap.
I get a fair amount of emails that look something like this: “Hey Brooks, I’m interested in going paperless and I use Quickbooks. Any ideas how I can attach scanned invoices or receipts to my Quickbook entries?”
More often than not, I point them to SmartVault, which started out as a Quickbook plugin to attach documents to your entries, but has grown into a full online solution to store, view, and share files. Since I send people there so often, I thought I’d do a runthrough of the service.
I am going to break this into two posts: Part 1 (which you are reading now) will run through SmartVault’s document storage capabilities. Part 2 will delve into the service’s integration with Quickbooks and how it integrates with the Fujitsu ScanSnap so that you can scan right into SmartVault and to your Quickbooks entries.
In this post I am going to be using SmartVault’s Lite plan which is free for one user. They have plans that go from $19.99/month and up depending on how many users that you have, how much storage you need, etc. You can see the different plans here.
SmartVault Portal
When you first sign up for SmartVault, you’ll log into their online system, the SmartVault Portal.
From there, you can upload and download files, manage sharing, and do basic file management. Its a pretty standard online file portal.
By the way, it won’t look like this to normal users. This is the “Advanced View” for Administrators. If you want to give other users or clients access to your/their SmartVault, they’d see a much simplified version.
SmartVault Launchpad
Having an online portal to store and download files is good, but the real power of SmartVault comes when you download their desktop client, SmartVault Desktop.
Their desktop client gives you a launchpad that will let you go to the online portal, will map your SmartVault Drive for you (more on that in a moment), Backup and Restore your Quickbooks data, and manage other settings.
Unfortunately, the SmartVault Desktop software is Windows-only, though you can do some functions on the Mac.
Map SmartVault Drive
You can do some computer voodoo to make a new drive on your computer that reads from your online SmartVault. What the heck does that mean?
You might remember earlier that I had two files uploaded to my SmartVault Portal website.
On my Windows machine I created a new drive, called “S:”. It is slightly technically involved to set that up normally, but luckily the SmartVault Launchpad will do it for you.
You can see here that now that I have my S drive mapped, my vaults, folders, and files that I had set up on the website now appear as if they are on my computer.
By the way, for you Mac users out there, this is one area of SmartVault that you can do too. You can map a Volume to your SmartVault drive. Unfortunately you have to do it manually as our forefathers did though. Instructions for that are here.
One thing I should mention about this: this is not like Dropbox where the files are synced to your computer. Once you lose your network connection, the drive is not there anymore (though once you reconnect it is back of course). If you want to backup the files in your SmartVault drive, you can just copy them to your C drive or external backup.
Set Up Your Vaults
Once you have the techy stuff set up, you’ll want to set up your vaults and folders. You can do that either in the website, or by creating folders in your SmartVault Drive. Obviously you will want to create a vault and folder structure that works for your specific circumstances.
Upload Documents
So, great, you have this online portal and drive, now how do you upload documents to it?
First you can scan documents straight to your SmartVault, either with a ScanSnap or other scanner, and I’ll be covering that in more depth in Part 2.
Next you can upload it to the SmartVault Portal. When you log in and select your vault, you’ll have an option on the right to upload.
Probably the easiest way is to just copy files to your newly-mapped SmartVault Drive. Once you copy or move a file into a folder, it will automagically upload it to SmartVault’s servers.
If you’re working on a document in Word or Excel, you can just go File > Save As and save it to your mapped drive. Same thing.
Share Files & Folders
SmartVault lets you share your files and folders with other employees, clients, etc. You can either share with specific people or create groups, and give different access levels (read only, full access, create and delete, etc).
I can see this sharing functionality being particularly useful for sharing Quickbooks information between clients and their accountants/bookkeepers.
This has been an overview of the file storage features of SmartVault. In Part 2, we’ll dig into how it integrates with QuickBooks and how you can use your ScanSnap or other scanner to scan straight into your SmartVault and/or a Quickbooks entry.