Good morning,
after several years of hesitation, we are now planning to finally migrate to a more modern invoice management and, more in general, yo a fully paper-less management system for our family.
As of today, while having few invoice (around 20-30%) coming online in pdf, we still print and store them in paper form.
QR was a big innovation that could of around 70-80% our billing time, basically bringing down to zero the possible tipying mistakes. I personally love it.
What we would like to do now is the next step: minimize (eventually to zero ideally…) the paper storage and manage only invoices electronically.
At the same time, what I would need is also to store other type of documents electronically, so that I can truly get reed of the archive (that today is becoming truly a big deal to manage, even physically in the space taken in our house…).
We have seen this eBill: it looks like to be interesting, but I see definitely that it is not a solution to manage all invoices, but only the only coming through their system.
Is it true? Any one having good/bad experience with it?
To go for my second point, the integrated document management system (kind of ERP…), how do you deal with it?.is there a special software you are using that could enable everything a family need within only one solution?
I have seen softwares like Bexio or Banana, but I am kind of worry when I think to set up such kind of system at home (I have already SAP and others at work… it’s enough…).
I am sure that here, with so many IT savvy people, a set proper solutions was already found and discussed.
What exactly do you need to manage?
When an invoice comes (in digital or paper/qr form), I pay it and forget it (throw it away).
If it’s needed for taxes, there can always be an invoice extraction from the paid item in ebanking.
As for the “rest of documents” - I would get a simple scanner and digitalize them (onto cloud or PC in a set of folders; But I don’t yet, not such a huge burden yet).
I use e-bill. Before I used to scan paper invoices and then put them to the cloud. But still many invoices are sent in paper form.
For now I use the e-post scanning service. You have unlimited cloud space and can pay invoices directly with one klick. I think it is around CHF 100 per year.
BTW: they are using labels in a “OR” instead of “AND” manner, which makes it difficult to organize the data. Already opened a ticket which was answered and ignored…
Lets say I use “house” “2024” and “invoice”. Instead of seeing the invoices for the house from 2024 I see everything with any of those labels… which makes no sense.
For integrated doc management the best purchase I made was a Scansnap ix500 discontinued now
15 years ago. Bills, receipts, everything goes through it. Saves as readable pdfs. Scanned paper I pencil “scanned” and sits in a pile for a year or so before recycling.
The software feeds it to whatever storage system you are into. I tried a few and I am still biting the bullet of cost and using Evernote. Every year I try to move away from it and so far, no success (Nextcloud local).
Also wondering what others use on the storage side.
eBill is the best solution for managing recurring bills. It’s straightforward to set up and saves you time on things like energy, health insurance and internet bills. You can also download detailed bills as PDFs.
I keep PDFs and scans of all important documents on my laptop to avoid relying on third-party apps. I also use Unison to synchronise this drive with a USB stick as a backup and travel solution, and it has worked perfectly for 15+ years.
Of how many invoices are we talking about? (eBill, PDF, Paper)
My approach for my family (around 50 eBill and 50 PDF/paper invoices):
PDFs (eBill and PDF invoices) are stored in a simple folder & file structure (1 folder per year, files / PDFs with a “describing name”, date as prefix)
Relevant paper invoices are scanned via phone app (Genius Scan), automatically saved in the cloud and later on manually moved to the same folder & file structure
Accounts, budgets and expenses are tracked 100% via firefly iii (https://www.firefly-iii.org/) - this mainly serves other purposes than “invoice mgmt.” - and we use cards when possible
It works for me and there were no gaps, issues, … in the last years. I know, there are much more sophisticated approaches. But I’d rather spend 5 min. looking for something when needed (2-3x per year) than invest 30 sec. per case for proper documentation, meta-data enrichment, classification,…
The problem with document management solutions is that most of them have a lock-in effect. It is not always easy to migrate to another system later on. My approach for years has been:
All documents are saved old school as PDF
The file format is: 20250304_sbb_invoice.pdf
I then simply put it in the appropriate folder: health, finances, housing, tax etc.
Unpaid invoices end up in a todo folder
I used a dedicated scanner for a long time, but now I use my smartphone [1] [2]
Don’t forget regular backups!
[1] Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Nextcloud etc. have all build-in camera scanners
[2] I’ve just remembered that I lent the dedicated scanner to a colleague and never got it back
Off topic but out of interest. Does any of them provide also OCR? In other words, can you search in for example google drive for specific words that you know are written in a PDF and it appears in the search function? So far I could not figure out a solution for this. With the high number of PDFs that would be really convenient.
I have used ebills and mostly stopped: it is really only for paying bills, with my bank (raiffeisen) you could only see bills for 3 or 6 months, after you’ve lost them.
I have stopped to simplify my workflow:
paper bills get scanned, OCR’d and stored on my NAS, name tagged as necessary
bills on email gets saved and name tagged as necessary
All end up in a single folder where I can search by name or by content (thanks to OCR).
No DB, no ERP, it is simple, it works fine since years for me (I started in 2013 and I scan systematically since 2014).
Just get a good laser printer/scanner (I’m with Canon gear since 2013) with ADF and recto/verso, it connect automatically to my NAS and dumps everything there on its own.
Scanned papers go in a shoe box, once full I write the start date and end date of documents in it, I put it away and buy a new pair of shoes
Any recommendations on scanner? I don’t need print capability. Just the ability to scan documents without having to feed them manually or turn the page over.
The ability to connect via LAN and scan to an NFS share would be helpful.
I have had 2 Canon MFC scanners (first one lost to my ex-), currently I have an MF635 i-sensys but is a printer scanner and photocopier. When I looked, scanners alone costed more.
This one has a recto-verso scanner from the ADF (direct RV scan in one pass!), has OCR, connects with SMB (don’t know about NFS), can send scans via email and you can customise the screen with your own actions (I have one button for my scans to NAS, one for my scans to email, etc.).
Networking is via ethernet or wifi (I’m on ethernet).
With my limited printing, toner lasts forever and contrary to inkjet it prints fine even after months not been used.
Another brand which reportedly works well is Brother, but I have no direct experience.
I paid mine between 300 to 400 frs in 2019
Yes, I saw it and I’ll try to make a test when I have time.
What I don’t really like is the mania of putting a database everywhere (for personal use a/few text file(s) would be simpler and easier).
It is not clear to me if the system leaves your files where they are or if a copy is going to be made somewhere else, locking you in the system…
For automating the workflow I have been looking at n8n community edition (n8n.io) as it can work with Ollama, never went very far though…
What bank are you with? I have UBS and use E-Bill for 90% of my payments. You can directly download the invoice from the e-banking, which I store in my personal NAS. Otherwise UBS stores the E-bill invoices in the UBS “Safe” for a longer time than found in the “E-Bill” section of the E-Banking.
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