Paperless Office on my Mac

Once my shiny new Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 showed up, I knew I needed some way to organize all of my scanned documents. I was organizing my PDFs by elaborate naming and subdirectory schemes, but that’s a hack, not a real solution. I thought about putting everything into Bento, but what I really wanted was a dedicated document management system with easy organization, backup, meta-tagging, etc. It also had to be integrated with my shiny new scanner. Luckily, Macworld’s S1300 review listed 3 such applications: Mindtouch, Evernote and Mariner Software’s Paperless.

Mindtouch is opensource, which I like, but its pricing is a subscription model and it looks complicated. Reading through its website…well let’s just say they appear to be programmers and not marketing folks. Looking for a simple document management system and seeing Mindtouch comparing itself to Microsoft Sharepoint was an immediate downer.

I like Evernote. I use Evernote. I have it on my Mac and I have it on my iPhone. What I don’t have is Evernote Premium which allows me to save loads of documents. I’m also concerned about having all my personal and financial information and client documents stored in their cloud.

I’ve been a customer of Mariner Software (Macjournal) for 3 years now. Once I researched their Paperless product I knew this was the answer.

Paperless integrates directly with my Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 and allows me to create unique libraries for all my documents. The software also allows me to tell Paperless if a particular library contains general documents or receipts. It even goes a couple steps further and allows me to customize the meta-tags in each library. So far I haven’t needed to do any customization, but do see its usefulness…when I have more time. It also has a user-definable, automatic backup function to make sure my documents stick around (I shred my originals after scanning). I have a library for both my personal docs and separately personal receipts, and the same for each client and my own company. I also have a library just for woodworking articles from magazines. I rip out the pages of a particular article, scan it and then throw away the magazine.

I wish the documentation contained better instructions for configuring Paperless to work with my ScanSnap. Both Paperless and the scanner have configuration settings for the scanner. Which to use? What settings should I have for my use cases? Nothing. Ultimately I setup my ScanSnap software, when I push the blue scan button on the scanner, to automatically send my scans to Paperless. The blue button only sends the front page of each document (not duplex). I setup my scan button in Paperless to the exact same settings as my scanner software, except the software scan button scans documents in duplex.

Here’s a few quirks (bugs), which I am confident Mariner Software will address in its next software release. First, I can’t shut the app down from the dock. OS X also can’t shut down the app when it tries to turn off. This might not be a big issue, but it forced me to change how I (and all all my other Mac software) work. So Mariner, please fix this quirk. The solution is to go into the app’s pull down menu and close it manually. Second, the meta fields sometimes act up and don’t accept my keyboard’s input. The field’s automatically recognize previous entries and then autofill (which is cool), but when the app doesn’t recognize what I’m typing…things go awry. This one is almost a deal stopper for me, as it significantly slows me down. However this quirk is intermittent and a quick shutdown and startup of the app seams to fix it.

There are many other apps and methods of organizing PDFs, and I’m going to keep playing around with Bento. However, with a few quirks aside, I’m pretty happy with Mariner’s Paperless.