Office Equipment

These are a whole conversation in their own right. The rule of thumb seems to be that the more frequently you scan, the less of a scanner you need. So the list might look something like this, I ALWAYS demand duplex (double sided) and “single pass”, preferably to the cloud such as dropbox, but to an SD card is acceptable for later upload.

• Phone scanner apps
• Battery operated portable single sheet scanners, very small.
• Battery/mains portable printer/scanners
• Multi Function Combined printer/scanner such as for example a Brother-J5730DW now discontinued. This has also a flatbed for the occasional book page or scrumpled page that jams the sheet feeder. Note these types can fail with small receipts which can wrap themselves around a roller taking an hour to unpick. I wonder if that’s why they superceded it. Still, all the functions we want are there, wifi, ethernet, Dropbox, Gdrive etc therefore computer independent. I’d use this machine’s features as a check list, bearing in mind it’s an inexpensive device, unlike the next in this list.
• Dedicated duplex networked sheetfeed scanner, my current preference being Brother because their sheet feeders have always proven more reliable for me. So Brother’s scanners page illustrates the variety and my current choice is the ADS-2800W Wired and Wireless Network Desktop Scanner at a mere £390. Like I said NOT cheap, but when presented with hundreds of pages and tiny receipts using a flat bed simply is not realistic and less capable scanners cannot cope. This one will do a year’s worth of coffee receipts in a few seconds, front and back (to make sure we have the vat reg number). However, at this level it is a business choice that depends on how much control you have over what you have to scan and more importantly when. Once a year or once per event for example.
• OCR Optical Character Recognition is a good idea, but whether to do it during the scanning process or post scan using Adobe Acrobat or the like is a business choice. So is scanning direct to the cloud or to a folder that is shared to the cloud. Both these increase scan times.

There is a natural tendency to use a phone app such as Camscanner. There are many when searched I just have used the former and found it effective. I would like to use Adobe’s app, but they try to restrict to where I can save. In both cases and others the principal useful feature is to automatically recognise the document shape and to scan that, so not so much care (meaning time) is required. Do NOT take photographs! These are impractical as to file size and format. You need PDFs. Do pay attention to not missing bits off the edge of the page and not inducing camera shake as both can render the scan unreadable . Please. What you are striving for here are VALID tax invoices.

The advantage of this approach when you are scanning-as-you-go, such as petrol receipts, coffee receipts and other “shrapnel” so as to avoid having to manage all those scraps of paper, it saves a lot of paper management time. That said, if you are not also scanning to a “logging” service the manual bookkeeping is not being avoided.

Again there are many and all tend to use an app to scan the receipt. Some require you to do the work by typing info in. Others do this for you with varying degrees of accuracy. My preferred service has been “receipt bank” now known as Dext , because they have human intervention to ensure scanning accuracy. For me that is priceless; also very nice is the single link click straight to the scanned copy.

(This is NOT “bank rec” in traditional terminology.)

A trick I suggest is to use a dedicated bank account for all these “shrapnel” payments so it is easy(easier) to reconcile (tie up) the payment transactions to the scanned paper receipts. Dext can (usually) “collect” your bank transactions and in theory tie amounts to receipts (i.e. code or categorise) . This can work (be more accurate) where your transactions are repetitive and after “telling” the system once that “Tesco” is “subsistence” (your lunch sandwiches and a drink while working away) it will save you the trouble in future. Just make sure you review (check) the results. So, do NOT then use this account for your weekly personal shopping. Vehicle fuel can be difficult where you buy it at the petrol station of the supermarket where you buy your subsistence, depends if the receipt uses a distinuishable name.

All these results then integrate in to your suitably selected accounting system.

So all of that can be a bit of a time investment, but the payoff is huge time savings and accurate bookkeeping, not least where VAT recovery and saving tax on expenses are involved. Why not save taxes? There is also the extra peace of mind that your records can survive any inspection by tax inspectors etc.

I rarely print these days and use the MFC mentioned above. I used to use laser, but have reverted to ink jet because of the reduced volume in modern times where all/most docs are sent by email or loaded to a portal. Left far too long, ink jets can clog.

I no longer have a fax machine, but can send and receive faxes by email.

Why? Aside from all the privacy legal requirements why might we want to shred everything? Answer: to avoid theft and abuse of our identity, for one thing.

Then there are the legal and professional requirements. Typical household shredders will shred about 8 sheets at a time, with no staples present. They always jam, they always need baby sitting. They are a hidden time vampire. A complete waste of time. Again it is like the scanner, if you shred every day MAYBE such a device will do. However, how much time per day do you plan to spend shredding? What you require is a scanner where you walk up to it, drop a sheaf of paper on to it, press go and walk away. Then every now and then drop 500 sheets or more on to the shredder and walk away. Time spent? A few seconds in both cases. These machines last for years if properly looked after. They have replaceable parts to allow for wear. Mine? My floor standing walk up to and drop Fellowes monster and this looks like the modern replacement. I reckon my shredder is ten years old and my recently replaced MFC was over 12 years old. I replaced it because I wanted the new technology built in that did not exist in the previous decade. The new machine was half the price and half the size. The result of all these devices is I spend very little time scanning and shredding and when I do I do not have to think or baby sit.

• Hardware Firewalls
• Mac or PC? Always a healthy debate. I use both.
• Mobile phones iPhone or Android? Another debate. Ditto.
• NAS drives Synology, QNAP, Seagate, Western Digital are leaders.The “catch” is how to back up a 30 terabyte NAS? Another NAS? That gets expensive and time consuming.
• DAS i.e. external disk drives. These can compete with NAS for example Promise Pegasus. For me the advantage is they are vastly faster than networked storage (NAS).