OFFICE SCANNERS

+1 on the snap scan. Mine came with a rack filer program that organizes everything. I still throw the paper into a bin in case the tax man wants hard copies, but dont waste anytime organizing that bin.

We bought 2 Fujitsu fi-6130 scanners about 8 years ago. We scan 100% of everything and have a 2tb drive in our server which is also backs up into the cloud. We currently have 51 gig's of data. Neither scanner have given us any issues. We created and use a windows folder system which works for us. I can retrieve any document from my computer, the scan computer or my bookkeepers computer. The advisors can look up old notes, invoices and parts receipts from their work stations. If we did not have this system we would have at least 10 filing cabinets. My bookkeeper scans for maybe 15-20 minutes a day when she finishes her paperwork. I would be happy to share more if needed.

I'm big into computers and technology. There are a lot of advantages to scanning everything, but there are some drawbacks. It does take a considerable amount of time to scan and organize everything. It can also be challenging to find what you are looking for at times. Did you file it by date, supplier name, category, or something else. If you are looking for a specific part, unless you know what invoice it is on, you may have to find and review numerous invoices to find the part. My service manager is great with customers, but no so much with computers and technology. Which means he would be coming to me a lot to help him find things. Right now he can open the file cabinet, grab the folder for the month he is interested in and recognize invoices quickly, because most of the suppliers have unique invoices. 

What I was doing is keeping a years worth of the paper in the file cabinet for easy retrieval. I would scan all the older stuff and recycle the paper. I would create 2 files for each month. One for parts, and one for everything else using Adobe Acrobat DC. I would then use OCR to recognize and save all the text. Then when I needed to find something, I would just open the file and do a text search. 

I have gotten away from scanning and back to putting everything in file boxes that is more than a year old, and at the start of the year, I recycle everything more than 5 years old. Also, so much can be retrieved online now (WorldPac invoices, bank statements, NAPA invoices and statements, etc.) that there is less and less of a need to save a lot of this. 

Let us know what you decide and how it works for you.

Scott    

I agree on the Fujitsu ScanSnap as being great scanners.

I'm going to agree with the scan snap people. I have been using it for almost seven years and it is still going strong. 

We just have everything save to our computer (backed up to the cloud). The files are so small that it really isn't a problem. Each year I go into the scanned folder and delete anything over 5 years old. I figure that we have our shop management system that keeps all digital copies of the ROs forever, and if we would have needed anything from the scanned copy, it would have been within those 5 years.

The most important thing we figured out with the scanning took us a while to realize. Scanning does take up a LOT of time if you are doing it all at once. It used to be a real drain on our time. But then we started scanning as soon as we checked the customer out. We check them out, scan the RO with any associated parts invoices, label them with the customer name and RO #, then stick the hard copy in the shred pile. It takes no time whatsoever and we are always caught up!

Every now and then we get a rush on customers and the ROs pile up for a few minutes, but scanning 5-10 ROs takes no more than 5 minutes at the most.