I am trying to make my office “Paperless” which means I will need to start scanning a large amount of documents. I am looking for suggestions about good, simple to use software that will allow me to do this efficiently. I am thinking something with OCR would be best but I hear mixed things about the accuracy of OCR software. Any suggestions?
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Dave S.
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What Is Some Good Scanning Software for My Small Business?
Comments: 6 Responses to “What Is Some Good Scanning Software for My Small Business?”
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You need both good scanning software and hardware. Which scanner do you have now? You'll need something that makes it easy to scan in documents. Using a traditional flat-bed scanner, or one meant for one page at a time won't work well.
I made my office paperless a few years ago, and tried two products. I liked them both.
The first was the stuff from the Neat company. http://macmost.com/neatreceipts-review.html You've probably seen their commercials. They have improved their software and hardware since.
Then I also tried The SnapScan http://macmost.com/fujitsu-scansnap-s1500m.html
That comes with software too. But the hardware is what makes it a winner. I hesitated for a long time with that one because of the price, but eventually did it and was glad to have spent the money when I saw it eat hundreds of pages of old documents with ease. The software is pretty good too.
So there are two suggestions for you.
Both use OCR, and the accuracy isn't perfect. But it doesn't need to be. They scan the whole document as an image, so you have the document. The OCR is just a layer on top of it that helps you with searches later on.
If he already has a scanner and is just looking for software I recommend VueScan. It supports many scanners so it will most likely support his. It's not intuitive but it has a moderate learning curve.
If you want to go paperless, I urge you to get the iBook Paperless. It was $5, but any day now will/is $10. It is a bargain at $10. David Sparks is an attorney and he has found lots of great things to help with a paperless office. I use Text Expander a lot. Sparks uses JotNot to capture scans with an iPhone. Myself I like Scanner Pro. PDFpen has OCR built in. I cannot say enough good about the SnapScan 1500 scanner. It just eats paper and never ever has an issue. Sparks said on a podcost he used one in his law office for 5 years and did not remember a single jam (which I doubt) and that he did not have to replace the rollers. Roller replacement is the biggest generic issue with autofeed scanners. All this stuff I mention and more is in the Paperless iBook. It has dozens of movies to demo things. Just to give you one more idea -- how about scanning your water bill and having a system that "looks" at each incoming scan which recognizes the water bill, renames it and finally moves the renamed water bill into the correct folder? Sparks has his systems tuned to do that and more.
Gordon
Atlanta
I have not used this "program" yet. If you contact these folk - they *will* stay in touch. The reference to their "product" comes from a reputable source.
paperitis.at.paperitis.com
Or, visit their web site: http://paperitis.com -- yes, that is an excellent resource.
Thanks all for your responses, they are very much appreciated.
I ended up going with a program called [removed] from a company called [removed]. A friend of mine recommended their software. This app did the trick very well. One thing that attracted me to this app was that it supported so many scanners with its own drivers (I think around 300-400 scanners with their own drivers). It was very easy to set up with my home scanner. The OCR software on it works great as well. It is really really fast even with my documents that have 10 to 15 pages, and seems to be quite accurate. If you guys want to check out their stuff, I posted a link to their site down below.
[link removed]
Thanks again for the help
Eric