Last year, I wrote about ditching Paperless and storing all my documents in the Finder. This was driven by 2 main things. The first was I didn’t know how long Paperless would be around as it was getting kind of dated. And second I wanted to be able to see my documents and receipts on any device.
Now that I’ve been using the Finder for a year, I can say that the transition has been pretty seamless. My initial plan was to only use the Finder for new things and keep using Paperless for older documents. However, when discussing this with my father, I went ahead and wrote an app that took all of my old Paperless libraries and extracted the PDFs into folders just the way I wanted. So after the extraction, I had all my receipts dating back to 2006 accessible on my Mac, iPad and iPhone.
This is great and has come in handy when I want to find things when I’m not at my Mac or when I’m out and about (my wife has asked me what we paid for something and I was able to look it up in the store). With the Finder being able to search contents of the documents, it is pretty easy to locate a receipt or document. One thing that I still do is when I scan receipts using my ScanSnap, I have it OCR the documents. Unfortunately sometimes receipts are so cryptic that even with perfect OCR, a search may not turn up what I need. However, by stored the documents by year and month with the file name being the merchant name and date, I have a good chance of finding what I need. Note that while your can scan from an iPhone or iPad using the ScanSnap, it won’t OCR the documents, so I still scan all receipts that I don’t get electronically on my Mac.
Now back to my first reason for transitioning to the Finder and that was the longevity of the app. As of the writing of this entry, the website for Paperless has been offline for at least a few weeks and all email bounces. I have no idea what happened to the company and I hope the owner is OK.
If you’re still using Paperless and would like to transition to using the Finder, I hope my Paperless Extractor can help and bring you some piece of mind that you won’t be stuck when/if Paperless eventually breaks (all apps break at some point).
It was a good run, ReceiptWallet/Paperless!