(Archived) scanning question please help

[oxtart 0]

Is there a way to scan multiple pieces of paper ie. phone bill, electric bill, grocery receipt all at the same time then separate them in evernote? It all scans as a single note. does this question make sense? please help. Im using a scansnap s1300

[jbenson2 2,147]

I have a ScanSanp S300. It works great.

But I never would consider letting it accept all my bills and other info in one pass. Some bills I want to duplex scan, other more simple bills I want to only scan one side. And the bills (especially the credit card statements) come in different sizes, which make scanning more difficult.

So I scan each set of documents separately at the front end. The 5 page phone bill will be scanned. Then I will scan the 1 page Lawn Sprinkler reminder postcard. Then I will scan the wedding invitation. And on, and on.

In my experience, I don't see any way a scanned PDF containing 20 bills could be separated by Evernote.

It could be done with 3rd party PDF editing software in the back end, but the additional amount of time would not be worth the bother.

[oxtart 0]

Thanks for your input jbenson2. How about this? Im also thinking of using evernote for my business to scan in all my service invoices so i can keep a history of work. I was thinking of once a week taking them and scanning them all in one shot. I wonder if the OCR is good enough to recognize my handwriting so that I can search out an invoice by a customers last name or date? Any thoughts?

[jbenson2 2,147]

This is just my personal opinion. If the information is needed for your business, it needs to be more accurate. OCR can be helpful, but I would not totally rely on it to understand handwriting, especially my own.

I would recommend that you have a strong system of tags to ensure you can retrieve all the documents you need. I like to group all my company tags in one group. Com-IBM, Com-ATT, Com-HP, Com-Allstate.

Also tag the type of document - Doc-inv, Doc-stmt, Doc-paid, Doc-adv, etc. Use whatever format you want, but try to be consistent

Use the F8 key to be sure the create date is the same as the document date.

More advanced suggestions:

Try to be consistent with your titles. Not mandatory, but helpful. I use a structured title format that is basically YR MO DA State City Who What

Starting with the date helps find mis-typed titles

example: 2010 07 25 MN Maple Grove Dr Jones JLB dental work

If I wanted to find all notes from the city of Maple Grove, I would search for:

intitle:"Maple Grove"

I could even narrow the results for notes from Maple Grove created between November and December 2008

created:20081101 -created:20090101 intitle:"Maple Grove"