Digital Filing Cabinet

[bean29]

My husband runs an Insurance Agency. Some agents from his company were set up with a "Digital Office" by the Home office about a year ago, but the company has not implemented the technology for all the agents yet. The agents get a budget for Technology to spend as they see fit, the company does not really pay for it though.

So, DH wants to go ahead and buy a scanner so that he scans the documents he would normally file and then he can call them back up on his computer as he needs them.

I was reading Inc. Magazine and found an add for Neat Desk

neatco.com/incfree

I watched the video, and scaned receipts are accepted by the IRS. The data you scan in can be assigned categories and can be exported to Quickbooks or Turbotax. I plan to invest in this for home, am curious if anyone is using this or a similar product, how is it going? DH is a 1099 employee so I have to complete a schedule C. We also own 2 rental properties so lots of uses for it. But I want just for the digital receipt filing.

[Deleted]

Just make sure you have multiple copies of your digital files in case one of the copies gets ruined.

[alabamagal]

I think the programs like that work pretty well, but it just depends on the person who is using it. If you have a "messy" desk person who never puts things in folders, just has piles of stuff everywhere, then just putting a computer system that does the filing generally does not work, or is difficult. If you have an "organized" person who files everything and can find all their receipts, then the electronic filing system will work well.

And make sure you have backups.

[MN-Investor]

You might want to do some research at Amazon. NeatDesk gets pretty mediocre reviews there. Personally, I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 document scanner (the predecessor to the current ScanSnap S1500) and I absolutely love it. It saves files into pdf format. I have it perform character recognition too so the documents are text searchable. Take a look at the ScanSnap S1500 and see if that will fit your husband's needs.

[bean29]

Thanks MN-Investor, that is why I decided to post about it...I figured there may be better options out there.

I think I might have a greater personal use than DH might at the office. I suspect his company had issues when they tried to implement the doucment filing digitally which is why it has been over a year since the pilot and it has not been rolled out to other agents.

I am an accountant and I know what I need and prettymuch how to categorize it, so if it does not get recorded properly I will probably catch it right away. Right now I have piles of reciepts and if I can organize it better it would be a big help. If I can read it into my computer and have the computer total it it will save me even more time.

In additon, recently I have questioned how much I paid for something like an appliance, how old it was etc. So, being able to call up an old receipt has potential uses too.

[Baby Fawkes]

I'm currently using the NeatWorks mobile scanner and I really like it. The scanner quality is a little lacking, but I only use it documents and have a nice desktop scanner.

However, the really great point that made me buy it was the software that they provide for storing things. This was the single biggest selling point for me.

It may possible to use a different scanner with the software, but you might have to import PDF docs as I'm not sure how integrated it would be with the ScanSnap scanner.

I don't have the desktop scanner either so I can't comment on the quality or speed of that.

[moneymaven]

Bean - I work in insurance. There are some great industry software systems for just this. Our agency is totally paperless. We use AMS 360. It's online based and hosted so we are not responsible for maintaining the systems that store the information. We used to use Applied/TAM and that used an edocument system called eTFile.

Depending on what DH uses, he should check these out. There are some great, cost effective options out there depending on his volume.

We have one large copier in the office with scanning capability. Once scanned, we just attach them to the client in the system and recycle the paper copies. Our company is 10 people and about $10M in business, so it works great for us.

[bean29]

Thanks, INSMoneyMaven...

He has a meeting tomorrow....hopefully they are going to roll it out. If not we will probably proceed on our own. I know the agency is over 1M but I really am not sure how big it is. I think he is considered a Mid-sized agency but he was #1 and #3 I think for Prop and Auto New Bus written in his (Multi-State) region last year.

[moneymaven]

good luck to him!