Evernote makes paperless storage a practical (and affordable) reality

I have spent years inching towards paperlessness.  My working papers have been paperless for over 10 years but the question has been what to do with all those bits of paper everyone else gives me.  Scanning seemed to be the answer but filing in a searchable way was a problem - this is now solved!

Evernote now offers a solution that costs from nothing up to $45 a year (yes free to £30 a year).  At its simplest, it allows scanned images to be flicked through like a paper file but it is much, much more powerful than that.

Key points about the paid for version:

• Invoices (or anything else) can be scanned as pdfs and are then searchable (Evernote uses optical character recognition (OCR) to 'read' douments)
• Electronic papers can be emailed in and are searchable
• Any part (or all) of a web site can be 'clipped' into a notebook - great for evidence of web transactions or for collecting research materials
• Notebooks synchronise with the cloud (and other machines/users if you wish) so it is more secure against loss than paper
• Notes can be accessed and stored by smart phone and Evernote will use OCR on photos of receipts and other documents

I have been using Evernote since about Dec 2010, gradually testing ease of use, reliability and different settings.  Following the purchase of a new scanner in May 2011, I really am ready to stop storing paper. 

In my opinion, with the right help, it should easily be possible to set everything up and learn how to use Evernote in a day.  This could be for a home office or SME office - accommodating up to about 5 ring binders full of paper a month.  

If you would like to investigate this more and see a demonstration, please send me an email at: michael@veale.org.uk

Disclosure: Michael Veale is a director of Smart Accounts Sussex Ltd and neither he nor the company has any financial links to Evernote (except using their software).  Evernote is easy to learn but if you would like to save yourself some time and effort, he would be interested to discuss providing training and set up assistance, for a fee.