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I'm just finally taking the time to learn about paperless office. I already do the shredding and get most of my stuff electronically, but what I don't know is about scanning. 

What do you all scan and what do you just toss? I already scan paper notes and other things that I want to keep for future reference but what else do you all scan? 

Do I need to keep my bills once they are paid like my parents did or is that just for proof that they were paid in case the try to come back and say we still owed? 

Does anyone know of a good scanner that will scan both sides of a document at once? 

 

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8 hours ago, Husky Logic said:

What do you all scan and what do you just toss?

I scan all paper, and then toss in a set of cardboard boxes   
Most of that will end in the shredder

>>Does anyone know of a good scanner that will scan both sides of a document at once? 

I  have access to office scanners,   
but I mostly use the Scannable app, and my iPad camera   

afaik  Duplex scanners use two passes

 
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Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners do both sides in one pass. Mine is a s1300i which I chose for it’s relative portability. I love it.

 

The Fujitsu IX500 gets a good rap and has for years

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Personally I am using a Fujitsu ix500 for all larger scanning jobs. It will convert a stack of up to 50 pages into a pdf just like that, full duplex (in one go), and send it to EN. It is not cheap, but a real time saver if you need to scan higher volumes. If it is a few pages I use my iPhone and the app ScannerPro. It has a feature called workflows - I have established severally cover my most frequent scanning tasks, like receipts. The workflow sends the scan right into the correct notebook and tags it with a set of standard tags.

With the Fujitsu you can maybe find some used ones. The new ix1500 is out, which has a touch display. The rest is like it was in the 500 - maybe some companies exchange their used 500s for the new  model. There are cheaper scanners, but they usually handle less pages. Then it comes close to scanning with the phone in terms of time invested. 

If you need to keep a paper physically depends on the legislation in your place. In Germany tax authorities accept the electronic copy when declaring - however if they decide to check you out, you have to show them the paper original, going back 10 years. What I do is sort paper into 2 categories after scanning: Shredder or need to keep. Except a few documents (real ones ...) I put my tax stuff into a box and store it away when the year is over. Shredder is more than 90%, luckily.

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Yup - pretty much what everyone else said so far.  My personal approach to scanning is: unless there's a very good reason NOT to scan something,  it gets tossed in the scanner. Everything except documents I need to keep goes into a 'shred me' box for a week or two in case I find a problem with the scan.  I use an S1500 - which came before the IX - that has so far done 25,300+ page scans and is still going strong.  I'd very strongly recommend that you get a sheet-fed scanner if you plan to process lots of paper.  You would not believe how tiresome it is to keep on opening and closing a flatbed lid if you're dealing with volume.  Other than that pretty much any scanner will do - which one depends on your budget.  Scanning directly into Evernote is not a must have - scanning to disk and saving searchable (OCR'd) files are.

One caveat - most page scanners are not great for photographs.  I also have an Epson 'Perfection' flatbed photo scanner which does a better job than the Fujitsu in that area.

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To add a word about these multi-purpose-printers that often come with a scanning function as well: Most of them produce sufficient scanning results for documents, however most of them do only simplex scanning. They are usually restricted to 10,15 or 20 pages max. Usually they are short of software to process the scans. So seen from a workflow / efficiency perspective, they will not do much better than a mobile phone's camera.

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6 hours ago, Druid9 said:

Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners do both sides in one pass. Mine is a s1300i which I chose for it’s relative portability. I love it.

 

The Fujitsu IX500 gets a good rap and has for years

I like the look of the s1300i as well Druid.  There are so many and the prices very so much. The ix500 is over 600, but your s1300i is half the cost.  I will have to do some research. The ix1500 looks nice as well. 

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I use an s1300i as well.  Price is good and I really like the footprint, pretty much 4x11.  It is portable but I have one in each office I use, simpler.  I've been using them for at least six years now.  Relative to what to scan, whatever you think you might need in the future, be it letters, documents, statements, receipts, manuals, insurance, whatever.  Err to the side of too much in my opinion.  I scan and shred right after. 

As an example, I scan credit card receipts.  It seems like a bit of overkill but I'm never sure what receipt I might need in the future so I just scan them all.  It's easy to batch scan them creating a PDF per receipt via a ScanSnap Manager profile I created. I don't change the titles just add tags Receipt and _YYYY.  Search works just fine on the contents of the PDF, OCR'd by ScanSnap.  FWIW.

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