I’ve been using Devonthink for a while now, but never got around to making my paper-based invoice workflow any better and I think I am missing a lot of potential I have with Devonthink.
I am having a hard time finding good information on how to set this up best, so hopefully you guys can point me in the right direction.
What am I currently doing with paper invoices I receive by snail mail:
Scan the invoice using a Fujitsu Scansnap ix500, stamp the invoice that it is scanned, put it in a box, put the box in an archive once a year
Scansnap Home is configured to pass the new Invoice to Devonthink (Pro 3.0.3), where it arrives in the Inbox with a scanning date/time-stamp, e.g. 2020_01_12_13_05_11
DT is converting “to searchable PDF”, enter metadata is off
I open the invoice once it’s time to pay it using PDF Expert, copy & paste the wire transfer information into my e-banking platform
I use a custom stamp (including a date) in PDF expert to mark the invoice paid, safe & close the invoice
I manually rename the PDF to the invoice date, who the originating company is and what is contained, e.g. “2020-01-02 Microsoft - New Office License.pdf”
I reorder the invoice to an archive database for general invoices (consumer goods) or special databases/groups/folders for special invoices from insurances (separated by insurance type, e.g. car, health, etc.)
This whole process has a few downsides, mostly in the amount of manual work I need to do for renaming the document and sorting it. Since I am already doing this for a while, I now have a big inbox (procrastination problem) with mixed paid and unpaid invoices.
Also, I quite often miss due dates because I am forgetting that I scanned an invoice to DT.
What can I do to make this better without having to enter a lot of manual additional information to DT, e.g. due date, invoice date etc.?
thanks for the input!
Is there a way of seeing the “proposed name” and the “document date” before actually carrying out the renaming?
So far, it seems that DT3’s proposed names are a lot less accurate (and mostly garbage) than what Scan Snap is giving me when I scan to file. I normally use Greyscale, low compression, best quality settings when scanning as a reasonable tradeoff between document size and quality. Should I be using other settings so that DT3 gets better results?