FreeBeer

Surprised nobody has mentioned the use of larger monitors. Like others, I started wearing glasses (58 now) a few years back for reading. But, the biggest improvement for me is that I bought a cheap 24" monitor a few years back on Black Friday. Since then, I have a 28" and another 24". So useful and so easy on the eyes. And when the Black Friday, or Prime days, or Boxing day sales roll thru - they are very affordable. Amazon Prime days are delayed this year but are expected in August from what I'm reading (on my big monitors!). W.

Taking the plunge this year and doing a major purge of old ***** and digitizing as much as possible. Tieing it to tax time and so far its going well. I debated over getting a scanner, but in the end, decided to use the free app from Microsoft called 'Lens'. It simply takes a picture (PDF) of the page and supports adding multiple pages for those longer and double-sided docs. Just doing an INBOX method where I review later and rename as/if needed. Then a simple folder per year with subfolders when/if needed for special scans or important items. Most just goto a general folder under the year because they are recurring, common items. Only catch is that MS Lens doesn't upload to Evernote. But, I'm at the point where I've decided no one offering from one source (i.e. Evernote, Onenote/Onedrive, Notion, etc.) is going to do everything. So, I use Evernote for some things and Onenote/Onedrive for others. In this case, the Finances are going over to Microsoft. I opted for the family plan for Onedrive at $99 per year. It gives me 5 users and 1TB of space for each. On the organization side, I stumbled across something called PARA that you can Google. Its a way of organizing your data into Projects — Areas — Resources — Archives. Not a lot different that what I was doing but like most people, always looking to improve. I could import or export from one into the other to keep everything in one, which I have done previously. But, its too much work to do for everything all the time. So, I now have multiple services for varying purposes, as described by: 1.) Evernote Tech info and research. System settings 2.) Onenote / Onedrive Home organization - Onenote Scanned docs - Onedrive General doc/pics storage and backups 1TB X 5 users! 3.) Clickup Tasks and projects Nice Google Calendar integration. 4.) Notion New kid on the block. Wow so far but steep learning curve (at least for me). It almost does too much and they're just getting started. Testing Calendars, tasks, and such for now. No offline storage yet beyond last read cache! Good luck in your journey. W.

This is an ancient problem because there is no standard location or placement of the date on documents. Every bill/receipt/invoice, etc. all has the same info but in varying locations an formats. We struggled with this even at work back in the 80's with reports spewed out from IBM AS400's or other systems when trying to aggregate the important bits into a report usable for analysis. There are apps that can be used to process scans or text documents and programmed to only focus on a specific area and scrape data. But, every form from every vendor would need to be individually setup. Plus, printed or PDF formats change frequently so the intelligence would have to be maintained.