Use a ScanSnap scanner with Evernote to store and search receipts by store name or keyword. Evernote's free plan (60 MB/month) works for most receipt users, while Premium ($5/month) adds 1 GB/month and offline access. Scanned receipts become searchable PDFs you can retrieve, print, or email for refunds and accounting.
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So I got a question from a reader on YouTube who just bought a ScanSnap and wanted to integrate it with Evernote and was wondering, is Evernote the best way to manage your receipts? This is the main reason I bought my, my scanner was because it integrated with Evernote and I could go paperless, get rid of all my receipts, and now have no paper in my office. Everything is digital and I use either the ScanSnap or even now just the the camera on my phone to be able to take pictures and save it in Evernote and have everything searchable. So the question here was, just bought the ScanSnap, I'm thinking about Evernote but I don't know if I'll buy it, not sure if it's free. ScanSnap came with Fujitsu Rock2 filer, not sure if it's similar to Evernote, what are your thoughts? So backing up for those of you who aren't as familiar, Evernote is a great way to store all of your information, anything you want to keep on hand, keep records of, so it's great for receipts. That's how I first started and then expanded to use it for a whole bunch of different options. You'll find people are obsessed with Evernote and use it for a lot of different reasons. I do too, but for this video we're just going to talk about receipts. A great way to use it is with the Fujitsu scanner. There's a couple models of it. This is the one that I have here, and you basically scan it in, it saves a digital image, it goes to your Evernote, and the beautiful thing about it is then you can search for using your computer. So if you buy something at Staples and you throw away the receipt, you could just type in Staples and you can find that receipt anytime. So it's so much easier than having to go through a shoebox full of data. And the great thing about Evernote too is that everything is online, so you can find it from a web browser, you can find it from your mobile device, anywhere you can basically have access, any electronic device, you can find your receipt. So Classic examples, if I had bought something at Staples, I could pull up the receipt on my iPad from the store. I could show it to them, they could scan it and give me a refund for a product if I didn't have the receipt anymore. And I've done that. So it's a great way to manage your information. So the program that they were talking about was called the Roktu Filer. I'm not really familiar with this too much, but it comes with Fujitsu if you want to use it. I can't again talk too specifically about it, but But the reason why I like Evernote as a powerful software tool is that it saves everything automatically, not just to your computer but also the cloud, and you can access it from any device that you have that's connected to Evernote. So very powerful. In terms of is it free or not, Evernote is free for up to 60 megabytes. So if you scan up to 60 megabytes of data, you could do that every month. So 60 megabytes of new data every month can be uploaded for free to Evernote and their servers. And when I was just scanning in receipts, that's all I used. It was the free version. I never really went past my 60 megabytes. If you're scanning in mostly black and white stuff, uh, and it's receipts, you're not really going to go past the limit. It's when you get into color documents or really high resolution stuff, pictures that you want to save, that can start to chew up your, your limits a little bit more. The main reason why I went Pro was if you want mobile access to your files offline. So I use Evernote a lot for travel, and I'll make notes of every city I'm going to and what I'm going to do in each city, and I need access to that locally. So I don't want to connect to the internet to be able to get those files. And so to do that, you have to pay the Premium or Business version, and that starts at $5 a month. So the premium version, if you really want to do it, is $5 a month or $45 for the year. This gives you 1 gigabyte per month, and if you go up to business, that's 2 gigabytes of data per month, and you get the offline access. So I'm on the premium plan now, but only because I use it for reasons outside of business receipts. If you're on the— if you're just using it for receipts, the easiest way to get started is just a free plan, and it helps you test, test it out, see if you like it, see if you're getting value from it. And if then you want to invest more into it, you can, but you probably wouldn't need to if you're just using it for receipts. So I wanted to clip over to Evernote quickly. So this is my Evernote. I have a ton of notebooks. These are my receipts. So I have almost 4,000 notes, and anytime I buy something or use my, my credit card, I'll pop it in here and it'll save a picture. This is what it'll look like if it comes through your ScanSnap and Evernote. And you can see the receipt. So I don't even know what this is that I bought, but, uh, it cost me $24. So there we go. Um, so I bought it at Sharon Garden. And if I ever needed to, you know, print this off, I could print it off again and use it for accounting purposes if I wanted to. More recently, I haven't even been using the ScanSnap, and I've just been taking pictures using my camera phone. So depending on what I'm buying— so this is Costco, so this has to be sorted. But, you know, so I bought a hot dog at Costco and I can scan it in here, and this will come up with a full-text search. I'm using both, but I tend to lean more towards the camera just because it's a lot easier. But if you need high quality, then you can pull it up from your ScanSnap. But the beautiful thing about this, and if you're looking at any other solution, you want to make sure this ability is here, is to do a search. So say I bought something at Staples, I can pull up— I could just type Staples and they'll pull up something here. So this is from a picture that I took, right? This is a picture that I took of a receipt, and it can see that I've bought it from Staples. So if I ever need to find this, you can see, you know, what I bought here— some drive, some scissors, uh, packing tape— and it highlights the word. So it's found that for me automatically. I can go on, and here's another one that I've bought, some paper. And it just pulls it from Staples again. So the beautiful thing about this is you could throw away all your receipts, your contracts, your documents, anything that, that is just taking up space and clutter and it's hard to find when you really need it. It scans it in, it saves it as full-text PDF, it saves it locally to your computer and online so you can find it from any of your devices. And whenever you need to find it, you just type in the keyword up here and it'll pull it up. And from here I can loaded up as a PDF to email it if I want to. I could print it off. I could show it on my iPad if I need to go into the store and ask for a refund. So just basically quick access to all the information you need just by doing a quick search. So that's why I love using Evernote, and hopefully that answers the question, VS Bunny 1. If you have any other questions, let me know and I would be happy to do another video for you guys. Thank you. Take care.
