A decade of Paperless Office
I’m very bad at managing paper. Everything that is printed used to end up on a pile on my desk and over time the same thing happened to that pile as what happens to socks: they disappear inexplicable and never show up again. And when do show up it’s too late. In the case of socks, that is not the end of the world. For official documents, invoices and everything that is related to government taxes or personal documents that is a different ballgame. So about 11 years ago I decided to switch to a paperless office. I wrote a blog post about it 8 years ago that was quit popular. But since I dismantled my blog that got lost. But now 11 years later I come to find that the principle that I started back then is still up to date and works fine for me!
Like I did with my personal snapshots, you first need to take a step backwards to see what your main source of paper is and where you want it to end up.
In my case there are 3 types of sources:
1- Everything that gets delivered via regular mail
2- Tickets, Receipts, official documents, drivers license, insurance cards, …
3- Digital Papers. Invoices, documents, …sent via e-mail
In case of 1 & 2 it’s first a matter of getting stuff digitized, number 3 just needs a place to be saved on.
That brings us to the next step. What will be the main storage for your digital archive? That can be a local drive, a portable USB stick, … but I prefer it to be in the (secured) cloud: accessible from anywhere from any device at any given moment. A local drive can be lost, get wet, stolen, lost in a fire, …
There are several services to choose from. Since i’m an early stage dropbox user I decided back then to go with that platform. It’s not the cheapest but it’s very stable and has apps and integrations for almost every platform, app, software, … Using dropbox allows me to have local files that are synced to the cloud. Local files are easily searchable and are OCR readable. OCR enables the ability in a search that your computer can read what is written in the document, very handy if you are looking for a specific document or type of text. For example if you are searching for a specific line in your insurance policy OCR might come in as a life saver. You only need to create the documents like that, and that depends on the quality of the scanner you have.
Now we’ve analysed input and storage, about 25% is covered. What we still need to find out is where to archive it, how we manage the paper flow and how to structure it.
The output part is pretty easy. Either your Cloud Service is the final station and that’s where your archive stays. For me that is the case for my personal documents. But everything that concerns my business has an additional step. It needs to end up at my accountant. Luckily they are also pretty tech savvy and they have accounting software that allows dropbox integrations.
In case of a less tech savvy accountant, a zip folder or WeTransfer with all your files can be sent to them. In case of a prehistoric accountant: you can bring all the papers you scanned to them and print the digital ones 🤯. The level of digital integration of your accountant has nothing to do with the quality of the service they deliver. I can only tell that my accountant is focused on analysing my business and figures and not just a paper handler / archivist of my documents.
Back to the input, but this time the practical side of it. This is also pretty straight forward: I use two main tools to digitize my documents.
Receipts, tickets, … all the little paperwork I receive at restaurants, parking, cafés, … are processed by Scanbot: an IOS/Android app that allows direct upload to Dropbox or other cloud services. It even has OCR options in the paid version. It also allows to auto custom name your documents. In my case that is date-location-type. For example: 20191211-Mon-Dimi. That refers to a dinner with Dimi in Mon restaurant on a specific day. I’ll elaborate on the naming later. Scanbot will automatically add the date and location I just need to add the type and press save. It will be automatically uploaded to my preselected Dropbox folder.
Everything else that arrives by the mailman in plain old envelopes is scanned with my very trusted Brother ADS-2600WE scanner. I’m not going in to every spec of it. Highlights for me are: OCR scanning, double-sided scanning, direct upload to dropbox, multipages scanning to a single document, … You don’t even need to boot your computer. It’s directly linked via ethernet or Wifi to the internet. I made some shortcuts on the display to upload to different folders in Dropbox. Besides scanning boring invoices and official documents I scan the pictures that my kids draw for me.
Input, location and output are defined now. Now entering the blackbox on how to manage and handle those digital documents. It takes a little discipline to get this routine in your daily life but once you adapt to it, it’s a huge time-saver.
I find automatisation very important, I’m not lazy but I don’t like to do repetitive work. That was actually reason why I started looking for a digital & semi automated solution for my paperwork. But even more important is having control over the process and the ability to check if everything is running ok. That’s why a critical step in my paperless office are still manual actions. That way I keep an eye on things and detect error in an early stage. Nothing is more frustrating that you need to relocate, rename or rescan documents of the past 8 months because a silly error has occurred in your workflow. These errors can be caused by the most common things: new phone, changing your wifi password, new computer, …
The routine is simple. Every day I process what comes in and scan that directly into a general collection folder named “News Scans”. Files I receive digitally are saved in that same folder. When saved in the folder I rename the files as following yyyymmdd-source-detail: Scandate-whoistfrom-whatisit.pdf. For example: 20191211-amazon-inktcratridges.pdf. It’s not necessary to do that since we have OCR, but sometimes when the OCR fails, you’re really happy not opening every document. It also makes it easier to search.
Finally I separate the files that needs action into a subfolder “Te Betalen” (To Pay) Once that is done I move back to the root folder . In most cases it’s paying an invoice…
That’s it! This takes about 5 minutes a day.
Every week I open the “New Scans” folder and process what is in there.
Basically it’s a sorting process. I do the payments of the files in the folder “To Pay” and then I distribute everything between Personal Folders, My business archive and a shared Dropbox folder with my accountant.
Everything that is sent to my accountant is also stored on my own Dropbox. I don’t want to be dependent on them. If I ever change accountant, I still have my own business archive.
I organise everything by item name and then by year. Again, just another structure that allows me to quickly find things if the search fails me. Find a structure that works for you.
This takes me about 15 minutes each week. In total I spent between 30 & 50 minutes per week on my paperwork. And when it’s time for the quarterly or yearly delivery to my accountant for taxes… there is NO extra work. Those are just regular paperless archive days for me.
Some extra productivity apps that might help you with this:
- Alfred App: A advanced search application, let’s you configure what where and in what sequence to search for files, application, photos, … on you hard drive
- Text Expander: TextExpander lets you instantly insert snippets of text
from a repository. For example I use the abbreviation “ddate” to autogenerate a date stamp with a dash behind it, to easily rename the scanned files. I also use abbreviation for my invoice details, address, phone number, bank accounts, …
Unfortunately we still have to keep a paper archive in Belgium for tax reasons. I have a very structured and keen way of storing those actual papers.
This article is part of a series I wrote about how I handle my digital life:
My Perfect Travel kit
A decade of paperless office
How I roll in the cloud
Where do all the photos go
Being a Professional Photographer: The Never Ending back up Story
