Taming the financial paper monster

Getting a grip on all of the financial statements, bills, receipts — all of the paper, actually — has always been a challenge for me.  Here's the cycle:

• The financial statements, bills, and receipts pile up.
• The piles wear down my psyche like coarse-grit sandpaper.
• The papers get filed slowly because I need to relearn my system for filing the papers.
• Eventually, the piles are filed, or at least 80% of them are filed.
• The papers start to pile up again …

I've been supremely reluctant to do anything with the paper because it's guaranteed that if I throw away or delete something, I'll need it the next week.  That's happened to me too many times, so I just keep everything.  But I've hit wall after wall trying to find a system that makes it easy to organize paper.

My wife sent me a link to the Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500.  I'm really hoping that this ends up being more than a temporary, shiny new toy, but wow, can it ever scan stuff!  It has all of one button on it:  Scan.  Load a couple dozen pieces of paper in the top, and in about a minute it's gone through the pile, has processed the pages, autocorrected for upside-down pages and pages that I fed into the machine slightly cockeyed, and popped everything into a PDF file.  With a little more crunching, it's made all of them text-searchable.  The optical character recognition part is killer.  Big text, bold text, tiny text, it found everything I could see on the page.

It comes with another piece of software that rips through business cards with the same ravenous appetite.  It gets a lot of the text and even figures out the correct fields for the information on the cards.  Into a CSV file it goes.

Above all, using the ScanSnap S1500 is stupid easy.  That's very important, because nothing I had attempted before was as easy as this.

My plan is to scan my papers, organize them roughly by time and by purpose, and then store the originals in a box in case I need them.  (Someone told me that in some cases a scan of a document may not be good enough for certain purposes.)  But at least this will get the mess of papers out of my field of view so that it doesn't nag at me.  Since I've developed my Search-Fu over the years, I should be able to track down what I need fairly quickly if the entirety of the scanned documents are text-searchable.

The ScanScap S1500 is not cheap (about $400) but it jumps through hoops for that money.  Subconsciously I bristled at having to put each piece of paper in a flatbed scanner.  I never entertained it for more than ten seconds.  I doubt many people would, as it's too slow and labor-intensive.  This scanner makes the proverbial mincemeat out of paper.  It's fast and effective.