(Archived) Newcomer Questions

[47beka 0]

I literally made my new account an hour ago, and my brain is swirling with ideas for how to use this wonderful site. A little about myself . . . I work for my husband and father in law as their admin. asst. at a cabinet shop in FL. (Needless to say, we are not very technologically advanced due to their doubts about losing information on the internet. They'd rather keep PILES and PILES of invoices, pick tickets, etc. collecting dust and collecting hours of work for someone to organize.) :?

My problem is matching pick tickets with invoices from MANY vendors.

My idea is to scan them all into evernote, and then I can search by invoice # , po #, etc. (The possibilities are endless!!! Thank you very much!)

So to appease my husband and father in law, here's my husband's question before I can start this process: What if evernote goes out of business and shuts down? What will happen to all the information I uploaded?

If I get a good enough answer from someone out there, here are MY questions?

1. How much information/paperwork can I scan in with the free account? What's my limit b/c I'm pretty sure I'm gonna surpass it w/ all their junk paperwork!

2. How would you suggest filling/ organizing it? I've made no new files.

Thank you for your help and reading my story. -Beka

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

Beka, I think you'll LOVE Evernote for the task you described!

As far as your FIL's question:

viewtopic.php?f=53&t=18169&start=0&hilit=ability+access+database

As far as how much you can add with the free account, it depends upon your scan settings. The higher the resolution, the larger the file. Color files take more space than b&W/greyscale. I normally just use default settings & they have been fine for me.

Are most of your pick tickets & invoices typed/computer generated? Or handwritten? EN's OCR ability works best when PDFs are typed. Handwriting works better scanned as an image such as a jpeg.

Are most of your invoices/pick slips single page or multipage? PDF format works better for multipage.

From the way you described the problem you're trying to resolve, here's what I'd probably do. I'd create three notebooks. Inbox, Pick tickets, invoices. I'd scan into the inbox (or use a watched/import folder - the search function will help you find threads on those.) After doing some scanning, I'd assign proper tags, titles & keywords & then move the note into the appropriate notebook.

As far as assigning proper tags, titles & keywords go, here's what I'd probably do. If the document is handwritten, I'd probably add in keywords of the pertinent info such as PO#, invoice #, vendor name, just to make the search function more accurate. I'd probably set the title of an invoice to YYYYMMDD - Company A where YYYYMMDD is the invoice or pick date & Company A is the vendor name. This way, you can easily sort by date. I'd create a tag for each vendor & assign the vendor tag.

These are just starter ideas & you may find something that works better as you go along. I'd also suggest after entering some that you know should match up, try making sure you can match them up. IE, if you know two pick slips were generated for a single invoice, make sure you can do a search to find the one invoice & the two pick slips (or whatever types of searches you anticipate needing to do.) In order to do this, you may need to make sure you've manually added a keyword of something like "inv# 123456" to the two pick slips.

I may even end up creating two tags ("Invoice" & "pick slip") and assigning the appropriate one to each note & then putting all the notes into a single notebook. But when generating a lot of new notes, I tend to prefer to keep them separated into different notebooks, then assigning tags & dumping into a single notebook after I'm done with them.

Plus, we may be able to provide you with additional ideas if you play with it & describe any tasks that are not working the way you want them to.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

As I was thinking more about this, I realized once I matched up an invoice with all it's pick slips, I would probably merge them together into one note. Then either move the note to a "matched up" notebook or tag, so you'd not have to rummage through them if/when trying to find another invoice to match up to pick slips. Plus, by merging the notes together, you just have to find the one note for invoice 123456 & the invoice & pick slip(s) are all right there.

By adopting this practice (of moving off to a "matched up" notebook or tag), then, when you get all caught up (100 years from now? ) you would be able to quickly call up invoices that may have not been fulfilled. (Hope this makes sense.)

[47beka 0]

GENIUS!!! Thank you! I"ll be researching half the stuff you said to get it all set up, but I look forward to the challenge and the convenience of EN.

Is there anyway you could help me with Windows Client, tools, import folder???

Also, I "heard" that it's possible to scan/take a pic of an airline ticket to EN and then show a copy of it from my phone to the TSA agent? Is this possible?

Thank you!!!!!

[47beka 0]

Thank you for the extra idea. It does make sense, and I will more than likely try that.

FYI: MOST if not all of the invoices, etc. are black & white greyscale type, not a lot of handwritten, just notes added in if it got sent back or back ordered or something. So the space issue shouldn't be a problem.

Now I need to figure out how to get them to an import folder???

Thanks.

[ZenHarmony 0]

Thank you for the extra idea. It does make sense, and I will more than likely try that.

FYI: MOST if not all of the invoices, etc. are black & white greyscale type, not a lot of handwritten, just notes added in if it got sent back or back ordered or something. So the space issue shouldn't be a problem.

Now I need to figure out how to get them to an import folder???

Thanks.

Hi, beka!

I'm new here, too, but let's see if I can't help you with that issue:

According to the manual, drag and drop would probably be your simplest, and therefore best option: You can scan the invoice, receipt, ect, to your desktop, then simply open a new note in Evernote, hold down the left click button on the scanned item, and drag it onto the new note.

Let me know how that works for you!