Going green....

[PhiltheGill]

In the interests of "going green" I want to image all of my regular bills rather than rely on a paper filing system and as the option becomes available switch to electronic statements etc

I have been playing around with Scanning a few bills and also downloading PDF versions from my provider's Websites.

First learning point is that I need some sort of system to enable me to manage the images (Whether Jpg or PDF).

Does anyone else do this?... and, if so, how do you manage all of the documents?

Look forward to learning from you all!

Phil

[supremetwo]

Just name the documents as per the account, e.g. 'provider' 'bill or account description' 'date'.
A separate folder for each type of account if you wish or, if you use just one folder, can be sorted in file explorer 'name' column

[genou]

In the interests of "going green" I want to image all of my regular bills rather than rely on a paper filing system and as the option becomes available switch to electronic statements etc

I have been playing around with Scanning a few bills and also downloading PDF versions from my provider's Websites.

First learning point is that I need some sort of system to enable me to manage the images (Whether Jpg or PDF).

Does anyone else do this?... and, if so, how do you manage all of the documents?

Look forward to learning from you all!

Phil

I use Paperport software . But within that the organisation is <subject>/<year> / <topic> , so

Utility Bills / 2019 / EDF.pdf
Utility Bills / 2019 / UU.pdf

and so on. Paperport will allow you to "stack" the incoming PDFs so that you end up with one file for the year for each of EDF and UU. If you are keen it will OCR and index for you, but I have never found that necessary. I use it more widely for brokers / banks / insurance and so on.

[Infrasonic]

I'm paperless across the board on billing/statements, pretty much everything is online accounts and online PDF's (which can be downloaded), with emails alerting me to anything relevant like statements or changes to T&C's.

The odd bit of paperwork that comes through the post I scan using my smartphone camera and Microsoft Lens app (Google do a version of this too), which will auto frame/crop and PDF convert the document automatically. Good for receipts for warranty return items too, as many of them are on thermal paper which fades to nothing after a while...

[servodude]

Good for receipts for warranty return items too, as many of them are on thermal paper which fades to nothing after a while...

^ this!
I've had receipts I've put away for tax claims only for them to be illegible within a couple of months
- so I now make sure I have an image put away

- sd

[JonE]

I need some sort of system to enable me to manage the images (Whether Jpg or PDF).

I have used PaperPort (and its earlier, zero-cost incarnations) but found it not worth paying for all the features for my domestic purposes so nowadays just use NAPS2 when there's paper needing scanning plus PDF-Xchange to annotate and otherwise twiddle with documents. I choose to use the portable version of each and use the OCR in both (incoming paper tends to be in local language so NAPS2 is preset to that while PDF-Xchange is preset to English). Equivalents to PDF-Xchange are available - just pick whichever feels most comfortable in operation. You mention jpg files - forget 'em and stick to pdf. You may develop other requirements over time and will be able to find many free (or free versions of) pdf tools to perform niche functions if the need arises. For example, until recently I was sent a batch of >20 single-sheet scans each month and found PDFTKBuilder (also portable) to be a quick and easy way to assemble a sub-set of them into one ordered file (and it has other uses).

I find that 'Document Management' is handled perfectly adequately at domestic scale by File Explorer with no need for specialised programs. You might take the view that you could 'file' everything in a heap and rely on powerful searching to find what you want but some structure is usually helpful. For purposes where volumes could get significant this aspect needs some thought about how you typically use the documents (now and once they're digitised) so that you make things easier for yourself (even if it turns out that you didn't get it 100% right first time).

Storage that suits my purposes is in a hierarchy along the lines of propertyID/, category/ such as 'Purchase' or 'Refurb' or 'Utilities' and perhaps adding another level for calendar year or tax-year or accounting year as appropriate for the higher-level category. Files are (with help of preset defaults) consistently named 'YYYY-MM-DD xxx comment.pdf' where xxx indicates supplier/correspondent and comment is optional but might be something like 'New Tariff'. The date in the filename could be the invoice/notice date or the start/end date of the period covered by the invoice or a 'with effect from' date depending on how you'll want to retrieve and use the various documents. If you're running a personal finance program you might wish to quote the filename of an invoice in the 'memo' field of the entry for your payment. I'd very strongly suggest you retain use of the 'YYYY-' part of the filename even if you initially place files in year-specific folders and think it'd be redundant.

Cheers!

[Infrasonic]

^^ JonE's point about date naming year/month/day is a good one.

I only found out recently about the superiority of that filing system to the more intuitive day/month/year, so now I'm looking for a quick and reliable way to extract myself out of that corner (if anyone has any good suggestions, [maybe DM me to avoid derailing this thread]... ).

[UncleEbenezer]

Surely the green option is not to get them on paper in the first place?

I get as much as I can (i.e. whenever a supplier allows) electronically. If by email I can quickly search; if by other means I either trust the supplier's online system or keep my own copy named by org+date for reference.

[servodude]

^^ JonE's point about date naming year/month/day is a good one.

I only found out recently about the superiority of that filing system to the more intuitive day/month/year, so now I'm looking for a quick and reliable way to extract myself out of that corner (if anyone has any good suggestions, [maybe DM me to avoid derailing this thread]... ).

If I was doing it on Windows:

I'd grab a list of the files : using DIR /S/B
Drop that in a spread sheet
Use the string handlers to construct text to rename
Copy that to a batch file and run

There are bulk renamers that probably support ISO8601 (or God's own date format) but I generally prefer to roll my own in multiple steps so that I can validate each bit

-sd

[modellingman]

In the interests of "going green" I want to image all of my regular bills rather than rely on a paper filing system and as the option becomes available switch to electronic statements etc

I have been playing around with Scanning a few bills and also downloading PDF versions from my provider's Websites.

First learning point is that I need some sort of system to enable me to manage the images (Whether Jpg or PDF).

Does anyone else do this?... and, if so, how do you manage all of the documents?

Look forward to learning from you all!

Phil

It depends on what you mean by "system" and what the management problem is that you are wanting to solve. You have had responses from other posters which have covered (i) technology and software for converting paper documents to electronic format and (ii) file and folder naming conventions aimed at being able to identify and retrieve a particular document.

Like anyone who needs to keep records for tax purposes, my problem is that I may need to justify an amount entered on a particular line on my tax return in terms of the transactions that have contributed to that amount. So, for example, last year I had around 100 transactions which contributed to the "Repairs, Maintenance and Renewals" line on the Land and Property pages of my return. This accounted for about 10% of the gross rental income, so, if ever challenged, I definitely want to be able to identify the 100 or so invoices giving rise to my claimed expense. For management purposes, I may also want to be able to identify how this expense was split across the individual properties in my portfolio.

I started with the "system" I currently use around 20 years ago. It has worked well and, perhaps of interest to you, has coped well with a recent change to keeping all my records electronically.

First, I run a separate bank account for my property business, so pretty much every transaction associated with the business passes through this account. Second, I keep in Excel a version of my bank statements which I periodically update from the real bank statements. Its kept in the format of an Excel list(*). It has the usual columns for date, item, withdrawn, paid in and balance plus quite a few others besides. Its these other columns which are central to the sort of management tasks noted above. Currently it has around 8500 rows (the first transaction on it was back in August 2000!) and each fresh bank statement results in around 30-50 rows being added.

The additional columns include property (so I can identify which property was involved), tax year, code (I use around 50 different codes so I can get quite a detailed view of where expenses are being incurred, and all codes are TLAs so are relatively easy to remember) and a transaction id. The transaction id is key to managing the link back to invoices. It is a 5 digit number, unique to each transaction which started at 00001 back in August 2000, and each successive transaction taken from the bank statement increases it by 1 and its now upto around 08500. When I kept paper records of my expenses I used handwrite the transaction id on the front of the invoice and then file these by tax year in id order using nothing more sophisticated than a bulldog clip. These days, the vast majority of expense transactions come with electronic invoices and the remainder I now scan. As to the naming of these electronic versions, I rename them so the filenames always start with the transaction id.

So, to find the bits of paper or electronic files corresponding to whatever I want to find out, all I need to do is filter my Excel list according my chosen criteria - obtain the the relevant transaction ids and then look up either the relevant bit of paper or file. I even include a column which tells me whether I've got something to lookup and whether it is paper or electronic in format. Works for me. If you don't use a transaction id, then a naming convention based on yyyymmdd (or yyyy-mm-dd) at the start of the filename is an excellent suggestion. Using hyperlinks in Excel to link the record to the electronic document is an obvious refinement that could be made.

Incidentally, I use bits of Excel to process the list to get the entries for my tax return. These are based on Excel's data functions (such as DSUM) as at the time I started out that was practically the only way to sum values in a list across multiple selection criteria (several codes and a specific tax year). If I was starting now, I'd use the more recent SUMIFS function instead.

(*)This is probably not official terminology, but it follows these guidelines and should be familir to anyone with a basic grasp of spreadsheets.