Until very recently, my handling of paperwork was rather poorly. I keep all my letters and invoices in a big binder. Unfortunately at some point that binder got unsorted and I lost all motivation to sort new letters into it, so I started to insert fresh letters randomly. Eventually I lost even more motivation and began to just toss new letters into the compartment where I store the binder. It’s a big mess.

Then I discovered paperwork.

Paperwork massively simplifies the management of letters and other documents. Whenever I receive a new letter, I put it on my scanner, start paperwork and digitalize it. Paperwork automatically optimizes the scanned image and runs some OCR on it. All I have to type in manually, is the date of the letter. Paperwork automatically tries to detect the sender and tags the document based on that. All letters from my bank are labeled accordingly, while letters from my power company are given another label.

At first I missed the feature to create separate collections for different types of letters, but I quickly realized, that paperwork’s approach to order letters just by date and tags is way superior. Just scan, enter a date and you are done.

If I need a certain document, I can (thanks to OCR) do a full text search. Yay!

Unfortunately there are some bugs. When I move my mouse over some documents, the image viewer gets plain white with some massive letters on it. I suspect its a bug in the OCR display. However, I can work around that by literally just moving my mouse around the document 😀
Also, sometimes all my documents disappear from the overview, but a quick restart brings them back.

I’m so glad that I found paperwork. Finally I can get rid of a lot of useless letters 🙂 Now I’d like to know: How are you digitalizing your documents?

Happy Hacking!