Migration from Mariner Paperless to Devonthink

DEVONthink Feedback
41

In Australia, we are legally obligated to have ‘the last 7 years’ of financials at hand. An ‘audit’ can go back that far, if the Tax Office decides that.

I don’t want to have 2 years on DT3 and the years ‘before’ that on Paperless… I’d probably look to ‘bone’ Paperless altogether… it’s not well supported and the upgrades are few and far in between. It only does a few things well… I do like the conversion to .CSV and the display as tables…

42

That was my experience too :see_no_evil:

That was what I thought you might say; and my advice there would be to see this as a new system harbouring new methods and possibilities.

What do I do? I scan all documents relevant for the tax authorities. They are automatically OCRd and dated (set the created date of the record to the actual creation date the paper document) and I then drop them in one of - say - 6 main groups, which could be income, travel expenses, etc. (so whatever helps you provide the data to your tax authority). For each tax year I have a set of smart groups (again, think income, travel expenses, etc.) which display only those documents from the respective main group which are relevant to that specific tax year (determined by the document date, and in some cases a tag). I don’t extract the invoice amount, because I never found it to be reliable in Paperless, and - as extracting it bore no advantage other than having been able to do it - never really tried in DT. Any invoices which I receive on a regular basis are fully automated, so will be OCRd, dated and moved to the right group automatically. They could easily be tagged with additional information at the same time.

Is it worth a switch? Yes probably. It may well be the case that you end up running a virtual machine or keeping a Mac with an older version of macOS just to be able to access the files you already have otherwise. But I would like to recommend that you determine your goals and then set about implementing them in DEVONthink, rather than trying to copy Paperless one-to-one. At the same time I would leave the documents imported from paperless tagged, and decide later what it is that I want to do with them (i.e. rename the tags, import the data into custom metadata, ignore the data because it’s not helpful or whatever).

Again, this is the ideal scenario for smart groups; no hunting around, just a smart group which collates the data. And actually, search is very powerful in DT: you could quite easily search for records dated 1st June 2012 to 1st July 2012 and see what comes up.

43

For anyone else that finds this and, like me, has trouble figuring out why Paperless might not be copying over its meta data in the keywords, you may have to do the following:

  1. Make sure “Write Metadata” is checked in the Paperless “Files” preference tab
  2. Select all documents in Paperless and change one of the meta data fields, click out of the field, then change it back if desired - this just triggers Paperless to update the file
  3. This was the key that I was missing: Quit Paperless. This is when it updates all of its files. You may see a progress bar if there are a lot
  4. The meta data is now in the PDF files and dragging them to DT should preserve it
1 Like
44

Welcome @everkleer

Thank you for the nicelt detailed notes. I’m sure this will be useful to other migrating from Paperless. Much appreciated :slight_smile:

45

These Mariner Paperless development efforts have been updated: moving-from-mariner-paperless-to-devonthink/77817/15

1 Like