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Ask Slashdot: How To Go Paperless At Home?
THE_WELL_HUNG_OYSTER writes "Over the years, I've had numerous scanners equipped with automatic document feeders — and all of them jam or grab multiple pages at a time (thereby missing pages). Like you, I've got years of tax returns and legal documents to scan, but with these kinds of barriers, it would take months to scan everything. Enterprise-grade machines cost 5 figures. How do Slashdotters become paper-free?"
Try using Evernote and scan as you go, keeping up on all current items. Do extra ones when you have the time.
-Myke
Find someone who'll rent one to you.
to China
A sheet-feeder duplex scanner that'll scan and OCR to a PDF. Drop in your year of bank statements, press the button, come back in five minutes. Scan your receipts, product manuals, whatever you actually use. Throw out everything else.
Lots of places will scan documents for you on professional-grade scanners, including your local Kinko's. Sometimes, you don't save money by trying to do it yourself -- like when you keep buying another cheap scanner at a couple hundred a pop to avoid getting it done professionally.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
All those tax returns, legal paperwork... Can't they just stay on a box or at the basement? It'll require lots of work, and get few benefits. I would understand for new documents; i.e. introducing to a spreadsheet some taxes/things to pay. But why care about the past? Or, at least, why scan? Just type the figures, it'll be more semantic and wouldn't involve machines (except for you and the computer).
Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 totally rocks. I bought that refurbished for $250. Add in Yojimbo or Evernote and you'll be set. We've gone paperless in our office and at home, and this machine is the heart of that. We scan everything and shred it.
It's nice not having the paper around, but the BIG thing is not having to find it - it's always at your fingertips, searchable by document content or via the keywords in Evernote or Yojimbo.
How do you expect to be "paperfree" when almost the entire use of your paper has nothing to do with priting anything?
Most of paper is used for toiletpaper or paper towels or paper tissue.
So, how do you use those 3-shells??
I really don't understand the whole idea of going paperless. The vast majority of paper we get, we don't really need to keep more than a month or so. Bills, etc, when you get them, you review them for errors, if everything looks good you pay it, at most I keep 2 months worth of back bills around. If you close an account, keep the last statement for a year or two. Taxes, insurance papers, titles & deed, those you need to keep long term, but 7 years worth of returns, insurance contracts, deeds & titles will fit easily in one, maybe two, plastic file boxes that you can get from Staples for $20. A 2 draw filing cabinet and a couple plastic file boxes should handle the filing needs of the average family. Most people just keep too much paper. The reason you want to keep paper around is if there is ever a disagreement it is usable in court. I'm not sure scanned documents can be submitted to court, so I would never just scan then shred my tax returns.
"Have you seen my marbles"
I had this exact problem. With a scanner I was getting up to 3 scans per minute, and even at that rate it would have taken me months to scan all I wanted. I realized the problem was the physical moving of the element, and that if it were to take the whole snapshot at once then it would be a lot faster. A camera mounted overhead, with a trigger to snap photos dropped my scan time down so much I was doing 12-15 pages per minute. Assuming you get it well lit, with a decent camera that has little distortion, you can get images that are as good as a scanner MUCH faster. I posted about my setup here:
http://bobbaddeley.com/2011/05/fast-scanner/
I have Simple Scan on Ubuntu and a networked Brother MFC-7840W. The Brother has a multiple page feeder which doesn't jam much and Simple Scan which supports multiple pages. Couldn't be easier. Just put your document in the feeder, push scan and a few minutes later you have a 10 page PDF of it.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
I'm not sure what kind of document feeders the poster has been buying, but I regularly scan and fax hundreds of pages a week on a very affordable Brother multi-function machine. They cost about $300 and work just fine.
Of course, you could also take those old tax returns and stick them in a box in a closet somewhere on the 1/1,000,000 chance that you may ever need to look at them again.
I don't understand Slashdot's obsession with articles and questions about turning simple, mundane tasks into grossly overcomplicated, expensive technical "problems" in need of grossly overcomplicated, expensive technical "solutions".
I don't respond to AC's.
Install a bidet.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
My reaction is, why would you want to go "paper-free"?
Seriously. Are you allergic to paper or something?
It would be one thing if everybody sent you bills and documents electronically and you never had to deal with paper again, but you're talking about scanning things in with a document feeder. WTF?
Seriously. It is much, much harder to keep records electronically than to throw the pieces of paper into a file cabinet and forget about it. This is well documented.
Maybe for a company that produces huge piles and mounds of documents every year it makes sense to want to convert them to electronic formats, but for an individual it makes no sense. And you're not talking about stuff like marriage licenses, now, you're talking about random individual tax records from years ago. WHY are you losing sleep over it?
The mere fact that it's hard for you to figure out how to do it should be a big clue that IT'S AN INCREDIBLE AMOUNT OF WORK THAT YOU WOULDN'T OTHERWISE HAVE TO DO. Are you so bored?
Breakfast served all day!
What happens in 4 years time when the IRS wants to do an audit on your 2011 return and makes the request "Show us the receipts"? Likewise for any legal document under the sun. Sure its great to have scanned copies, but I bet that there is still a requirement to back them up with the paper originals
("oh look, I just found he document giving me ownership of slashdot. Pity its worthless")
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I go paperless by realizing that "paperless" doesn't mean I expunge all of the paper in my home, only that I don't print anything, and try to get all of my correspondence electronically. In other words, "paperless" means "consume no paper", not "have no paper".
I still have old tax returns, etc. at home as well. I am still paperless, because all of new bills come electronically, I pay them through online banking, I no longer have print news or magazine delivery, and since I put a red dot in my mailbox the only "mail" I get are parcel deliveries and seasonal cards. I have tried to convince family to stop spending money sending xmas cards (especially since I'm not an xian and don't celebrate xmas), but good luck convincing your 90-year old grandmother that she shouldn't be sending you cards, when she's only just wrapped her head around your being a lesbian, and is still having trouble with the tree-hugging dirt-worshipper thing.
Install a PDF exporter/printer as your default printer on your PC/Mac/etc. For Windows I would recommend the free PDFCreator from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ .
I do a lot of online shopping and like to keep a copy of my purchase receipts. I print my receipts to PDFCreator, name the output file something descriptive (YYYY-MM-DD - Merchant + Item description.pdf) and save the PDFs to a receipts folder. It fulfills my needs, doesn't waste paper, and I can print a receipt copy if I ever have the need.
When I had a bunch of old documents i wanted to image, I used a tripod to suspend my digital camera over my desk pointing downward, set it to fixed focus along with a bright light nearby, then my wife and I started snapping pics as fast as I could lay pages out. We used a DSLR, but any camera should work. Setting it to fixed focus was key to prevent focusing delays.
I'd put a page on the desk and she'd snap a pic as soon as I'd lay it down (with a remote shutter release, it would be easy to do it with one person). We did over 1000 pages in less than an hour - it took longer to shred the docs than it did to image them because the cheap shredder kept turning itself off due to thermal overload. I taped the focusing ring and zoom ring in place to make sure it didn't move out of focus and spot checked a few docs along the way to make sure everything looked good. My 10MP camera gave around 250dpi resolution for legal sized documents, which was more than sufficient for my needs. I originally thought I'd save them as uncompressed TIFF's and convert to PNG's, but it turned out that the "fine" JPG setting on the camera gave good results with small file sizes (and didn't need as many memory cards). I've printed a few of the docs since then, with adequate cropping in an image editor, the printed docs look about as good as a photocopy.
Maybe not the best solution for ongoing needs, but if you have a single big batch to do and you don't want to spend a lot of money on a scanner, it might be worth looking into. This method would work well with poor quality and/or oddly shaped originals like thermal paper receipts.
Do it at work! Not only do they have better machines, you get paid to do it there!
When will you surf Slashdot then?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
S1500 is good if it won't ever move from a desk.
S1100 doesn't have a document feeder, but could be OK if you need utra-portability.
S1300 is a good compromise. A document feeder and also portable. It's the one I have and I like it.
They all use the same software.
Note that these scanners don't use TWAIN drivers. Which is mostly a good thing as TWAIN has drawbacks, and makes scanning fiddly. But it does mean these scanners won't work directly from within apps that use TWAIN, and might be a problem with Linux machines.
As others have said, Fujitsu Snapscan. For around £350 you get a compact dual sided scanner that just works. We used them in a previous job and they had no trouble scanning thousands of pages a week with almost no jams.
Also, if any scanner starts to pick up multiple sheets or jam, look for a maintenance kit. Replacing the pads and rollers is a simple, routine task and does wonders. We kept spares in stock and had to service scanner feeds every couple of years or so.
although some paper work can be eliminated after 4 years, other needs to be retained much, much longer. Supporting documents for tax returns -- especially those not reported by third parties to the irs -- should be kept for a minimum of 3 years AFTER you file the return. Six years if you have under-reported or taken aggressive deductions that may reduce your taxes due by more than 25%.
In addition you should retain every receipt for the purchase and capital improvements to your house until (see above) years after you sell the house -- this includes new roofs, AC, appliances, remodeling expenses, etc.
Stock records should be kept as above.
Contracts (esp. big ones) should be kept until the contract is completed, and at least until the statue of limitations runs out.
This doesn't even get into business property -- where you can be audited on a desk you purchased up to 14 years later (in theory). Property related to assets (vs. expenses) should almost be retained indefinitely.