Hi all, just trying to wrap my head around doing my tax. My receipts are in mails, PDFs. All over the place. Does anyone have a good workflow for capturing and pulling them together, BUT have an final report output ? How do I do this ?
I struggle as sometimes I can’t save the document from mails, so use markdown save and then capture it. Doesn’t always work. So looking for something more but a long term solution, instapaper was mentioned but doesn’t Devonthink do this toI ?
Anyway hoping for some insight from the forum. Is DT even the right tool …
Thank you.
Which email client and which edition/version of DEVONthink do you use? Are the emails already in DEVONthink or still in your email client?
Arrrh ok
My receipts are distributed in different email accounts. Centralised to Mail on IOS and Mac, and a few local files.
Using latest DT3 pro on my Mac and DTTG on iPad. I did pull mails into Devonthink, but seems theres a few mails it couldn’t do I’ll need to look at.
You could e.g. import only the attachments via the script “Add attachments to DEVONthink” (see scripts menu while Apple Mail is active) and then process the PDF documents via smart rules.
Since you were asking about a workflow:
I only import the PDFs themselves into DT3, not the whole e-mail since the PDF is the only relevant thing. For some companies, I have a workflow outside of DT3 using Hazel & PDFpen to rename the files before sending them off to DT3.
In DT3, I use a script to find the amount and store that in a user meta data field (there’s also some predefined DT3 approach that I didn’t see before writing my script 
In the end, I summarize the receipts and their amounts in a sheet that I can then work with in Number or Excel.
I’ve never encountered anything else but PDF receipts in e-mails, so I wouldn’t know about converting whatever to Markdown and using that. At least in Germany, this is probably not even legal, because you’re modifying the original receipt.
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The markdown seems to allow PDF save hence that
Might need to look at Hazel and scripts but looks of things
I only use Hazel for renaming (after OCR’in with PDFpen) because it is a bit more versatile than DT3 in that aspect (renaming). Your problem seems to lie elsewhere, though it’s not clear, where. It might help if you’d explain the format etc. of your receipts in more detail.
Receipts can be PDF or doc or an image depending on source. Mostly attachments via emails, Challange is sifting through A few email accounts looking for them. Haven’t really out a system in place with emails yet, so email has always been digital storage. So this is my journey to address this amongst other things.
Zero inbox and GTD.
I’d suggest converting everything to PDF. Word can be ‘printed’ to it, images would have to be OCR’d by DT3 (or some other programm).
But depending on your local laws, you might still need to keep the original document.