Let me ask you a question?  What is the worst thing that could happen to your contracting, freelancing or small business?

I would imagine right up there with going bust and being sued is a visit from the tax man.   It’s never happened to me (and touch wood never will), but we all know that when the HMRC (or whoever your particular taxman works for) comes-a-knocking, we better have good records to back up all our business activities.

But do you really want all that paperwork floating around or sitting in files taking up space?

Paper Vs Electronic Storage – the UK Law

Following the UK Electronic Communications act 2000, an electronic form of document is deemed sufficient evidence in law.  That goes for contracts, agreements and of course receipts (seek your own legal advice to be sure).

This means if you have a scanned copy, then that is good enough for the taxman.  This also means you no longer have to store paper copies of everything.

Scanners and their problems

However, there is a problem in transforming everything from paper into bits and bytes.  When you go out and buy a dedicated scanner or multi-function printer/scanner, the device does not know what you are scanning.  It doesn’t know if that page of A4 is an invoice or a purchase order.

Scan all your invoices, receipts, orders or contracts and all you end up with is a big mess of PDF files named SCAN0001.PDF, SCAN0002.PDF and so on.  Whether you scan to JPEG, TIF or PDF – the sequential numbering of files generated actually makes the problem worse.

How do you find that critical contract when you have 5,000 PDFs and they have file names of SCAN00001 through to SCAN05000?

If you are lucky and prepared to spend the money, some scanners will perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on the documents.  Whilst this will slow down the scanning process, it does mean you can Windows (or Mac) search the PDFs for a known phrase.  But what about if you don’t know what text was on the contract?

There is a solution.

Decent PDF names

Over time, I have come to find that scanning to a PDF is the best option.  PDF scans will deal with multiple pages and front/back scanning (the term for this is Duplex) a lot better than scanning to a graphical format such as JPEG or TIFF.

Assuming you also want to scan to PDF, there is a free utility available created by a chap named Michael Weiner which allows the batch renaming of PDF files.   The great thing about this utility is that it cycles through all PDFs in a directory, displays them on screen, asks what you want to call it, and then renames the file for you.  The utility can be downloaded free here.

The way I scan my documents is that I scan any documents on receipt (or save received PDFs) to a directory then each weekend I quickly run through them using this utility, giving them decent names.  Once renamed, I then file them away.

Incidentally, I also save invoices and notes that are emailed to me in the same way.  I simply print any documents received to PDF (using the Free CutePDF virtual printer).  This installs a new virtual printer on your computer and you can then print any format of document to a new PDF file (via printing to the virtual printer) which I then save in the same location.

Storage Options

Once you have your collection of PDFs, what to do with them?   The system you select will depend on how fancy you want to be, how secure, how many documents you are likely to store, and of course how much you want to spend.

Here are some suggestions:

Accounts System – For any business money based documents (receipts, invoices, etc) I would recommend uploading them to your on-line accounting system.  I use Freeagent for all my money business processing, and I upload all documents associated to incomings and outgoings as I record them on Freeagent.   Everything is then easily at hand and Freegant deals with the storage and backup of the documents.

Evernote – If you are an Evernote user, then all the documents can be uploaded to Evernote.  This has the advantages that Evernote will automatically OCR your documents for later searching and you can create folders for different document types.  However, whilst the basic account of Evernote is free, uploading large amounts of PDFs will soon move you into the realms of a paid account.

Windows/Mac File Store – the cheap and cheerful solution is to simply keep them in a windows or Mac file directory somewhere on your computer’s hard disk.  As with Evernote you could keep them all in one big directory, or have sub-directories for different categories and document types (such as invoices, contracts etc).  Just remember to perform regular backups of your file store.

Sharepoint – My own personal product of choice is Microsoft Sharepoint (as I have a home Windows server anyway).  Sharepoint comes in a variety of sizes, styles and prices.  As I was using sharepoint for the storage of my general business documents (via integration to office), it seemed the logical choice to store my PDFs there as well.

Third Party Applications – Finally, there are a variety of paid for and free Document Management solutions available, including products such as OpenDocMan which is one of the better open source document storage systems.

Happy scanning.