Bills, Statements, mail, receipts

Forums › Desktop computing › Bills, Statements, mail, receipts - storing these

davidcole

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Topic # 125719 17-Jul-2013 10:29

Does anyone have any solutions for how they store this stuff?

I was thinking of evernote storing PDF files - but it lacked a consistent way of tagging/storing things to keep consistent metadata and relied on whoever was entering it.

Then there's the dump everything in directories and rely on windows searching for it.

What do others use? I have something I've written currently, and while it works it's pretty manual, and doesn't lend it self to much automation - ie taking an email feed, or online receipts etc without manually converting them to PDF.

I'm not worried about backups too much, but I do prefer that it be filebased with some sort of categorisation. Dropbox based is ok (as it backs up and keeps local copies) - evernote I almost dont like as it stored things in an internal DB but at least the notebooks are local.

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Reply # 857934 17-Jul-2013 10:34

Most of my bills come via email.

They stay in gmail as I rarely ever delete anything. Its easy finding them using the search gmail functionality.

Not a perfect solution. But I sometimes scan/email files to my gmail address, with relevant keywords in the email subject.

For the very important stuff I keep it on google drive.

davidcole

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Reply # 857937 17-Jul-2013 10:36

Klipspringer: Most of my bills come via email.

They stay in gmail as I rarely ever delete anything. Its easy finding them using the search gmail functionality.

Not a perfect solution. But I sometimes scan/email files to my gmail address, with relevant keywords in the email subject.

For the very important stuff I keep it on google drive.

Don't you get paranoid that google will kill your data (either drop the service and/or screw up your account). I also keep long term stuff in mine, copies of birth certifcates, letters etc.

Klipspringer

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Reply # 857940 17-Jul-2013 10:39

davidcole:

Don't you get paranoid that google will kill your data (either drop the service and/or screw up your account). I also keep long term stuff in mine, copies of birth certifcates, letters etc.

Actually yes.

Thats why I have crashplan which backs up my entire cached Google drive.
For gmail ...errmm now I'm feeling a bit paranoid....
I should probably setup something that dumps my gmail every night to disk so that crashplan can pick it up too.

davidcole

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Reply # 857948 17-Jul-2013 10:57

Klipspringer:
davidcole:

Don't you get paranoid that google will kill your data (either drop the service and/or screw up your account). I also keep long term stuff in mine, copies of birth certifcates, letters etc.

Actually yes.

Thats why I have crashplan which backs up my entire cached Google drive.
For gmail ...errmm now I'm feeling a bit paranoid....
I should probably setup something that dumps my gmail every night to disk so that crashplan can pick it up too.

Yeah I've just done that, gmvault - save everything as .eml files (or compressed versions).

So how are you "storing" stuff in gmail - just using the title? By labels?

Klipspringer

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Reply # 857954 17-Jul-2013 11:08

davidcole:

Yeah I've just done that, gmvault - save everything as .eml files (or compressed versions).

So how are you "storing" stuff in gmail - just using the title? By labels?

I simply just email the scanned email document to my gmail address.
The subject of the email contains some keywords in cases I ever need to find it again.

Not sure if you remember gmail drive? It was a third-party tool that use to utilize your gmail space as a drive on your computer (This was long before the days of google drive). I would save files to my gmail drive and they would appear as attachments in emails in gmail. It was really handy at the time but its probably the cause of my bad habits today. I stopped using gmail drive years ago and have never really gotten out of the habit of still saving stuff into gmail as messages with attachments.

Zeon

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Reply # 857957 17-Jul-2013 11:13

This is exactly what we do:
http://xtracta.com/

If you have emails, word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets - anything really Xtracta will automatically extract the data you want e.g. on a bill (invoice) you may want the date, amount, GST number, total, line items etc. which you want to be able to search on. There is a learning process so if we haven't seen the document type before a few examples will need to be tagged manually before the auto learning kicks in for that document type. But we process 100,000s of documents monthly so chances are we may have seen it.

We have a we based file storage software (a Joomla component) which we are going to both offer as a hosted service and release open source so you can host with us, host yourself or both. We have a few customers testing this.

Please PM me if you are interested.

Here are some screenshots:

Tagging/Processing screen:

Auto extraction in action:

And the File Hosting software:

redwingNZ

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Reply # 857958 17-Jul-2013 11:14

Yeah i do the same.. a few labels/folders in Gmail for bills/statements/receipts etc.. Some I have stored in Google drive scanned from phone and filed via PDF to recipets.

I haven't worried that they will cancel or delete things, i guess relying on an email from them that this will happen before they do anything. Im sure there would be a large backlash if they just did it..

MurrayM

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Reply # 861633 18-Jul-2013 14:42

The Android Google Drive app lets you take a photo of a document (receipts, invoices, etc) and it will save them in your Google Drive. It converts the photo into a PDF and also does some OCR to extract text which you can then search for. See http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57585824-285/use-google-drive-on-android-to-save-receipts/

davidcole

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Reply # 861645 18-Jul-2013 14:56

I think I've almost settled on Evernote - or I'll stick with my home grown solution.

I've got automatic forwarding and tagging from gmail to evernote, and if I save a pdf in my dropbox in a certain folder, that's imported also.

jarledb

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Reply # 861647 18-Jul-2013 14:56

Just a heads up. Using the internet service "If this then that" ITTT.com you can set up a workflow that can be triggered by labels etc. in Gmail.

Check out these workflows that people have made already: https://ifttt.com/recipes/search?q=gmail for instance the Evernote ones, or the Drobox ones..

Regarding Evernote: For scanning Evernote is pretty awesome, it OCRs your scanned receipts, invoices etc. so they are searchable. If you are on OS-X you should look into scan and Hazel which can be used to work magic on this kind of a problem.

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mattwnz

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Reply # 861648 18-Jul-2013 14:58

davidcole:
Klipspringer: Most of my bills come via email.

They stay in gmail as I rarely ever delete anything. Its easy finding them using the search gmail functionality.

Not a perfect solution. But I sometimes scan/email files to my gmail address, with relevant keywords in the email subject.

For the very important stuff I keep it on google drive.

Don't you get paranoid that google will kill your data (either drop the service and/or screw up your account). I also keep long term stuff in mine, copies of birth certifcates, letters etc.

That isn't a problem related to storing invoices in gmail. Many of these cloud online services, there is no way to really make a backup very easily if at all, yet in their terms they state that they are not responsible for loss of data.
Personally I store them all in outlook and have multiple backups in multiple locations of the PST file.

davidcole

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Reply # 861649 18-Jul-2013 14:58

jarledb: Just a heads up. Using the internet service "If this then that" ITTT.com you can set up a workflow that can be triggered by labels etc. in Gmail.

Check out these workflows that people have made already: https://ifttt.com/recipes/search?q=gmail for instance the Evernote ones, or the Drobox ones..

Regarding Evernote: For scanning Evernote is pretty awesome, it OCRs your scanned receipts, invoices etc. so they are searchable. If you are on OS-X you should look into scan and Hazel which can be used to work magic on this kind of a problem.

TBh I rolled my own ITTT rather than relying on yet another 3rd party service. Running a google script to read the emails.

I have one sheet in my google docs (of all places) that adds any custom tags before forwarding to evernote.

davidcole

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Reply # 861654 18-Jul-2013 15:03

mattwnz:
davidcole:
Klipspringer: Most of my bills come via email.

They stay in gmail as I rarely ever delete anything. Its easy finding them using the search gmail functionality.

Not a perfect solution. But I sometimes scan/email files to my gmail address, with relevant keywords in the email subject.

For the very important stuff I keep it on google drive.

Don't you get paranoid that google will kill your data (either drop the service and/or screw up your account). I also keep long term stuff in mine, copies of birth certifcates, letters etc.

That isn't a problem related to storing invoices in gmail. Many of these cloud online services, there is no way to really make a backup very easily if at all, yet in their terms they state that they are not responsible for loss of data.
Personally I store them all in outlook and have multiple backups in multiple locations of the PST file.

This is why you should be careful in which cloud service you choose. Dropbox for storage - or anything with a local folder sync, backup your gmail (by downloading with gmvault or into thunderbird/outlook). Things I tend to avoid are those where my only storage is their cloud system.

richms

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Reply # 862854 21-Jul-2013 00:17

I used to scan onto the PC, then create a new note in outlook, attach the file, rename it, and then drop it into my gmail imap folder tree.

That stopped working about a year back, got a weird error when dragging it and the imap connection would drop out and not come back without going offline and back online, or else closing and reopening outlook.

Then I found it was not letting me edit the subjects etc on emails. At about that point drive became available so I just started dumping the PDF's into folders in drive, so I could search them from the web google drive. Very handy with reciepts being able to search "the warehouse" toaster and get the reciept for a return of things ;)

Richard rich.ms

mattwnz

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Reply # 862858 21-Jul-2013 00:30

davidcole:

This is why you should be careful in which cloud service you choose. Dropbox for storage - or anything with a local folder sync, backup your gmail (by downloading with gmvault or into thunderbird/outlook). Things I tend to avoid are those where my only storage is their cloud system.

I was also meaning 'software as a service', where everything is done and stored online only, so there is no option for any local store.I have just started using a specifications SaaS, and everything is done via your web browser, nothing is saved locally. The output is a PDF whoich can't be copied. Very closed system in my opinion.I believe they do this partly to copyright, so things can'tbe copied. But this seems to be the way things are heading.

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