The BEST Way to BEAT Paper Chaos

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of #AskEvan. Today I'm going to be answering questions that people have left on our TELUS Talks Business post. I've created a couple new posts in a series called Entrepreneur Tools where I'm highlighting the tools that I use to run my business. And there's been a lot of questions that have come in, so I thought I'd do a quick video to answer some of them. The first one we did was on Evernote, and this is a great tool that helps you remember all the information that you need to remember across all your different devices. And I talked about how I use it to create a paperless office and for receipts, how to return purchase my iPad, business notes, how I use it for my travel. You can go back and read the post if you want. But I want to get down to some of the questions that came in. So the first one that was a question was from Ethel here. So, hi Evan, that's a great app, but what do I do if I don't have a ScanSnap because I use another scanner? So a great way that I use Evernote that I talked about in the video is I have a paperless office by using a scanner called ScanSnap, and from there I can access all of my receipts, documents, anything important that is paper originally, and have it saved in my Evernote so I can quickly search for it and find it whenever I want. ScanSnap is a specific scanner that's created by Fujitsu, I think, and it basically integrates with Evernote seamlessly. So it can do full text recognition. So if you're looking for a receipt from the Home Depot or Best Buy or whatever you've bought, you can just type in Home Depot and it'll find the scanned receipt for you. If you don't have the ScanSnap, I don't know if there are other scanners that do it. A lot of people talk about the ScanSnap, a lot of bloggers use it. And so that's why I picked it up and I've loved it ever since. But if you don't have the ScanSnap, you're looking for a different scanner, I just make sure that there's an integration with Evernote so it's easy. I'm all about making things easy and efficient and creating processes, so ScanSnap really is the best way to do it that I found. But if you're looking for another scanner, I just try to make sure they have that Evernote integration. But if you don't have a scanner yet, then check out ScanSnap. There's a lot of different options. I use the mobile portable one, so it's not that expensive. You can go up to really expensive, you know, huge ones if you have a ton of stuff, but I think as an entrepreneur, the portable one should be fine. But up to you, you can check it out, different prices, and see what works. So that was the first question. Lots of comments on these, which is good. Peter wrote in, "This is quite powerful, particularly for me. I'm an emerging businessperson and have often found challenges in managing my too many papers, particularly when I travel." this will prove to be quite handy. How do I, how do I have Evernote? I'm inspired. So Peter, all you have to do is go to Evernote.com. So, you know, whatever software you're using or operating system, you just go to Evernote.com and here you can download it. So you just click Get Evernote, it's free, and that'll create it on your computer. And if you have iPad or iPhone, You just have to go to the web store, or you should be able to do it from the website as well, and then install the app. And again, it's free to get started. You get a lot of space and everything for free. If you really need to upgrade, then you can, and it's still pretty cheap to upgrade. But I'd definitely recommend getting started on the free package, see if you're using it, see if it's helping you do what you want to do, and then upgrade if you need to. But even that, it's not that expensive. So just go to evernote.com, free. And check it out. So hopefully that answers your question there, Peter. On our YouTube video, so attached with the post, I always create a video to kind of explain what I'm doing. This is the first time filming the iPad, so it was a fun experience to go through, and hopefully kind of shows you guys a little bit more about it. We had a question here from John. Let's go find John. So, yeah, here it is. So John, so thanks Evan, always like your tools. Can you clarify the following? What scanner do you use to scan in all the small Visa receipts and awkward-sized ones that don't fit into a regular scanner easily? So again, it's called a ScanSnap. So if I just type in ScanSnap, do a quick little Google search, that should pull it up. So yeah, it is Fujitsu. So scansnap.fujitsu.com, or whatever country you're from, you can find a local one. And, you know, just go search and you can find the different options to buy a ScanSnap. Again, there's different prices, different models, just pick the one that suits you best. I'm using just the portable one, wasn't that expensive, and it serves all of my needs. So that was what it's called, ScanSnap. And do you do anything special to make the scans in PDF searchable? That is a major missing feature in my current digital file system using Dropbox. Basically, you can only search by file name and adds a lot of unnecessary work when scanning the receipts, invoices, to names of files. Yeah, that's a great point. So with ScanSnap, you have to set it up properly. So first of all, ScanSnap will just automatically save a file in your computer. You have to set it up so that it syncs with Evernote. That's where the real power comes in. Otherwise, you just have a PDF on your computer. When you can sync with Evernote, it's just one of the settings, then in there you can load up your Evernote and you can have access to all of the files that come in. Another one of the options with ScanSnap is to be able to make the files full-text searchable, which is what you want. So that means when you then go to Evernote, you can type in a word and it'll pull up any receipt that you're looking for. And that's huge. Like, you're not searching through shoeboxes full of receipts and trying to keep a filing system of where everything is, or trying to remember when you bought it or where you bought it. You can just do a full-text search. So you just have to turn that on. And then all your future ones will be automatically saved. You also have the option to scan it in, in color or in black and white. So depending on what you're scanning in, the color takes a little bit longer. So I usually just do black and white for business stuff because usually that's all I need. And you have the option to do double-sided or single-sided. So depending on what it is, I usually do single-sided because again, it takes longer to do double-sided even if the back page is blank and takes up a little bit more space. So I usually do single-sided unless, unless the file is double-sided. And then finally you have an option to do how much, how much quality do you need. So you can have really, really high quality or you can have low quality and kind of everywhere in between. I could play around with it. I'm nowhere near the high quality setting unless I'm scanning in a picture or something that I want to keep. And it's important that's good quality. If it's just documents, receipts, tax, you don't really need it to be super high quality. The higher the quality, the longer it also takes to scan. So if you're scanning in a whole bunch of receipts, you know, you don't want to spend too long doing it. So I found that to be super helpful. There's a lot of different options you could play with, so definitely go check out the settings. Sounds like I'm a— I should be a salesperson for ScanSnap. I have no affiliation with it, but it's a great product and it integrates really well with with Evernote, and their tech team is actually pretty good too if you have any problems. I've connected with them on one occasion, it was really helpful. So hopefully that's useful for you, John. Moving on, the next post that we did was about LastPass. And LastPass is a really cool tool that allows you to remember all your passwords, and it helps you create random secure passwords for new services that you're signing up for online. And it also lets you automatically log in to all your sites. You don't have to ever remember your passwords again. So this is the most recent tool that we did. There's also an app that you can put on your iPad that I talked about quickly where you basically can browse through your app and if you create an account through, you know, say you create a new PayPal account or you create whatever web service account, you can just go to your iPad, install the app and it will remember your password to log in to that site. Site. So that's really awesome time-saving tool instead of having to always remember what your passwords are. So we had a couple questions. Again, here is a video, um, talk about how I use it, so you can definitely check out the post if you want. And, uh, let's go down. So we have 20 comments, which is pretty good. Let's go look for Jihad. So there's one here. Or you can have Safari, and it'll also always remember your user password automatically across all the hardware. I just find it useful and don't have to remember it, though I do use Data Vault so it can save all my sensitive data so I don't forget it. So there is an option in Safari. I'm not super familiar with it. I tend not to use Safari as I use Chrome and I like all the plugins and extensions that come with Chrome. I believe with Safari you may be able to log in and have it remember it across different, different computers. I don't know if it works with iPads and iPhones as well, so something to check out. So it saves it in the history. I'm not sure if it'll do that or not. So that, that could work. The benefits of using LastPass instead of that is one, it'll create passwords for you. So here you have to remember in Safari, you still have to create a password on your own. With LastPass, it'll also automatically log you in. So it just saves a click, right? So if you go into whatever page, you're logging into your PayPal account or Facebook account or whatever it is, it'll automatically log you in right away instead of having you having to click that extra button to go through. And it's also, I find, a lot more secure. So when you're browsing, I have the option— if you look at this here, this yellow thing is LastPass, and I can turn that on and I can turn it off. And I have to set my password to be able to do that, and I can pick what sites I want it to automatically log me into and which ones I don't. So every time I log into a site, it asks me if I want to remember this password or not. The reason that's important is because if anybody else ever uses your computer, then, you know, they would have complete access. If you just stored in Safari, they'd be able to go into any of your files and log in automatically to any of your accounts. Whereas LastPass, you can safely say, okay, these are the ones I want to automatically log into or not. So again, LastPass is free. So, you know, given the option, it just saves a lot of time. Everything is a lot more secure. You can have everything across all your devices, so I would just do that instead of using Safari. But again, up to you, you know, I'm just sharing what I'm using and hopefully gives you some ideas what to do. And then one last question here came from Louis. Uh, I like it a lot. However, I think that you being a Chrome user, you must know that saves all your passwords if you so want it. Okay, sure, it doesn't create it, but you can always create your own password at your own like— at your own liking, right? Yes, it creates more secure passwords, but again, if you forget your LastPass password, all your passwords are there. Despite all the above, I agree it's easy to have such software, so thanks for sharing. So, yeah, similar to the Safari question, you could try to save it in Chrome. Again, issues about getting it across all your devices and also, you know, creating the password and how secure is that. If you forget your LastPass password, then yes, you know, you have to remember that one password to really get into all your other passwords. But just like anything else, they have a tool to remember, um, if you forget your password, they have a lost password tool. So you can just enter in your email and you can reset your LastPass password as long as you still have access to your email account. I guess that's where it could potentially fall down. Um, but yeah, it does help to remember your LastPass password. Um, but otherwise there's always a way to reset it. So in case you do forget it, you can still get access to it. So hopefully that helps. A lot of great questions coming in about the tools. We're going to be creating more videos about tools over the rest of the year, and we'll see how it goes. It was a test project and it seems to be getting some good feedback, so we really appreciate that. So if you guys have liked this video, I'd really appreciate it if you give it a thumbs up. It's what makes me want to create more of these videos for you guys. And if you have any questions about tools that I'm using or any other questions about your business, feel free to leave it in the comment section below. I always check those out and read them, and, uh, you know, appreciate seeing those come in and love being able to be a resource for you guys. So thank you, and we'll see you in the next episode.