Do you keep paper bank statements?

RobM99

Stubod said:

..nope....haven't had one for years, all online now...

Same here. You can always screen shot if that's a help. I recently threw out payslips from 1975!

GTR_King

wow 1975 that a long time ago, 

some banking apps don't allow screen shots 

mebu60

RobM99 said:

Stubod said:

..nope....haven't had one for years, all online now...

Same here. You can always screen shot if that's a help. I recently threw out payslips from 1975!

Mine from 1974 only met the shredder in recent years :-(

Kept the first one for daughter's amusement :-)

mebu60

'from' meaning 'dating back to' obvs! 

Raveloe

PDFs are the rule for me. What really annoys me are banks which do not allow you to download individual transactions as A4 PDFs with the full bank details of both parties properly displayed. Some banks use csv, png and other funny formats that take time to convert to amateurish-looking PDFs when one is making up document sets for accountants. Anyone who has to submit accounts to a professional becomes expert at document conversion — but still resents the time it takes. A great help in the business is this website: I love PDF free of charge PDF compression, conversion and so on. An absolute boon.

Raveloe

If you need to keep thermal-printed receipts such as till receipts and much dispatch information then scanning them to PDF is almost obligatory: thermal printing disappears in as little as a few months. I often wonder if it is a way of getting out of guarantee obligations — the disappearing proof of purchase.

B0bbyEwing

Out of interest, how do you guys scan your documents to .pdf? I'm looking to see if there's a better/more efficient way than what I currently have to do.

I'm using Microsoft Lens, photographing a document, then faffing around in the settings, uploading to OneDrive, removing it from OneDrive & putting it in GoogleDrive. 

I'm not interested in any method that costs money but looking to see if there's a better free way.

Raveloe

B0bbyEwing said:

Out of interest, how do you guys scan your documents to .pdf?

I use a Brother flat-top scanner-laser writer with Brother Control Centre scanning software. Very simple to use but, of course, only one sheet at a time. However, multiple pages can be scanned into a single document.

For PDF handling, I use Preview on the Mac which I find much simpler, quicker and, in certain respects, more versatile than Adobe Acrobat. Again, very straightforward to use and allows one to assemble multi-page documents from different sources. For example, a single document can contain a scanned invoice, a downloaded PDF from the bank showing the transfer made to cover the sum, and the record of payment. If you upload composite documents like this to the free-of-charge I Love PDF site  and compress them, one can usually reduce their digital size by at least 75% which is a real plus for long-term storage.

To get rid of my backlog of paper documents, I'm thinking of buying a Brother ADS-2200 desktop document scanner.

 At 35 pages per minute (ppm) double sided it should chew its way through my archives with refreshing speed. Just the same, I suspect theoretical ppm rates are just that — theoretical — so anyone with real life experience of desktop scanners with document feeders, please give us some feedback.

B0bbyEwing

Raveloe said:

B0bbyEwing said:

Out of interest, how do you guys scan your documents to .pdf?

I use a Brother flat-top scanner-laser writer with Brother Control Centre scanning software. Very simple to use but, of course, only one sheet at a time. However, multiple pages can be scanned into a single document.

For PDF handling, I use Preview on the Mac which I find much simpler, quicker and, in certain respects, more versatile than Adobe Acrobat. Again, very straightforward to use and allows one to assemble multi-page documents from different sources. For example, a single document can contain a scanned invoice, a downloaded PDF from the bank showing the transfer made to cover the sum, and the record of payment. If you upload composite documents like this to the free-of-charge I Love PDF site  and compress them, one can usually reduce their digital size by at least 75% which is a real plus for long-term storage.

To get rid of my backlog of paper documents, I'm thinking of buying a Brother ADS-2200 desktop document scanner.

 At 35 pages per minute (ppm) double sided it should chew its way through my archives with refreshing speed. Just the same, I suspect theoretical ppm rates are just that — theoretical — so anyone with real life experience of desktop scanners with document feeders, please give us some feedback.

Holy Moly. £250 to scan some documents. 

I'll stick to my phone I think. 

Though thanks for the tip. I'll see if my printer offers document scanning.

Update - superb, it does I just need to be careful as it seems to want to cut a piece off the edge.
The scanning process will be slower than the photo but when factoring in the renaming of files and transferring etc, the whole thing will be better with the scanner.

Gracias.

Raveloe

B0bbyEwing said:

Holy Moly. £250 to scan some documents. I'll stick to my phone I think.

Glad to have led you to discovering the potential of your printer-scanner.

Thanks to you too for focussing on the cost question here. I now see that the real point is time, which led me to calculate that I could probably scan a maximum of 100 sheets (=50 double-sided sheets) in an hour on my flat-bed scanner. If I priced my time at £10.00 an hour — roughly minimum wage — that makes £10.00 per 100 sheets. I suspect the actual work-flow speed of the desktop scanner would be something like 10 pages a minute, making 600 pages an hour or, in cost terms, £10.00 per 600 sheets.

The archive I mentioned is at least 5,000 pages so that would cost £500.00 on the flat-bed and £83.33 on the desktop. So the desktop would definitely pay for itself.

Obviously, if one has no archive to scan the problem is different. Even so, I suspect your mobile phone cost more than £250.00 so, as digital machines go, the outlay is not gigantic. So I will probably go for the desktop and look forward to the day when I have scanned enough documents to make room for the machine on the shelf! Many thanks for prompting me to make the calculations.