All my documents in the cloud.

Paperwork is such a hassle. I can organize my home network, file shares, digital media and business, but my office has always looked as if a bomb exploded and I've got plenty of stories of documents that were in there somewhere, but when needed they were nowhere to be found. The last couple of years taught me that if I ever received an invoice electronically, if the accountant sent me an e-mail that some payment (usually for an online purchase) was not covered by said invoice, I would find it in a jiffy and send it to him electronically.

So I've been thinking for awhile, why don't we simply put all of our paperwork in the cloud. The accountant, the bank manager, the architect, the construction company, all the documents that we've exchanged in the last year we've been able to do them by e-mail because at work we have this very large but very fast scanner that puts everything you throw at it on the network. Why not do something like this at home?

With our recent move into the new house, I replaced my aging Dell colour laserprinter and Canon photo printer with a Canon MX-895 multifunctional. Not only does it save space (that laserprinter was rather bulky) but it also comes with an document feeder and does two-side scanning of a bunch of papers that you put on it. From there it scans over the network to my home computer, where it's a simple matter of dragging & dropping those documents into a Chrome browser window in the proper Google Drive folder (I'm a Google Apps for Business customer).

Google does the OCR and makes your scans searchable and everything!

So I started to scan in all the incoming paperwork so far. Not much to begin with, I don't even know if I'll be scanning in older stuff, that would take ages, but two days into this and I already found I needed some obscure detail from the move to communicate with someone and found it waiting for me in my Google Drive, while in the office!

(...and people ask me why I'm all for the Cloud!)