Posts Tagged financial records
How to scan a 200-page book in just 1 minute?
First check out this book scanner:
So how would you improve upon this?
This is a video from the University of Tokyo where a researcher explains how it works:
Bookkeeping and Tax Preparation Help with DocSnaps
Posted by gordonlo in Guest Bloggers on October 17, 2009
Whether you are a sole proprietor or a small business, bookkeeping data entry is a nettlesome problem. DocSnaps helps you solve the paper problem and provides you completed books that you can take to your accountant or export any bookkeeping software like Quickbooks, or Simply Accounting.
Paper Pile
So gather up all your receipts and documents (bank statements, credit card statements, etc) that are needed for your bookkeeping and instead of manually entering all the information into an accounting software, you can scan the documents and upload them to your DocSnaps account. Not only are all your records stored online, but bookkeeping transactions are created for you. Here are the steps:
1. Create a DocSnaps account – First create a DocSnaps account if you don’t already have one. Go to the Signup page and fill in the simple form to get your new account activated. You will get an email to the email address you entered in the sign-up form with a welcome message and your own account on docsnaps. This is an email in the format: xxxxx@send.docsnaps.com. This is the email to which you send all your documents.
2. Upload all your documents – Next depending upon the number of documents you have and the type you can either snap them, scan them, eFax them, or email them. Here is how:
Snap a receipt
a. Snap them – This is ideal for receipts that you encounter on the road – eg. at the gas pump, or restaurant. Use your cellphone camera (resolution should be more then 1.5 MP) to take pictures of individual receipts. Place the receipt on a flat surface and hold the camera at least 1 feet above the receipt until you can see the full image in the viewfinder. Snap the picture keeping the camera steady. Similarly snap pictures of all your receipts – one snap shot per receipt. You can email each of these to your DocSnaps account one by one, or first capture them all, and when you get to computer download them and email to your DocSnaps account as an attachment.
b. Scan them – This is ideal for processing a large backlog of documents. With a good office scanner like Fujitsu ScanSnap scan in all your documents into PDF files. It is very fast and can take in paper of different sizes and thickness – bank statements, telephone bills, store receipts etc. You can get through a full folder of documents in less than 10 minutes. Once done log in to your DocSnaps account and upload the scanned images. You can even zip up all the documents and upload them. We will unzip the file, and split up large pdf files into individual documents.
c. eFax them – Ideal for automatically storing all your faxes, and capturing vendor invoices. If you have an eFax account then set the email address to your DocSnaps account email. This way any vendor invoices and faxes sent to you will go directly into your document repository online, where it will be indexed and processed. You can get an eFax account from eFax, or Octopus IP.
Record list in DocSnaps
d. email them – Ideal for capturing online transactions. When you purchase goods or services online vendors send you the bill to your email account. Services companies also send you monthly bills online (eg. utilities, server hosting, etc.), which can be set to automatically forward to your DocSnaps account.
3. Manage records online – DocSnaps FLY account comes with a set of expense categories. In the SPEED account you can create your own chart of accounts. Once all the documents are in your DocSnaps account, they will be indexed, categorized based on your expense categories or chart of accounts, and transactions created for them. This allows you to search all your records, tag them (eg. Project 1, business trip to new york, etc.), and view them online from anywhere. It gives you a breakdown of all your expenses by category, and generates tag reports.
DocSnaps Overview Page
4. Get expense reports and bookkeeping done – You can then export all this data to Quickbooks, Simply accounting, or a csv file. Select all the transactions you want to export and choose the format and it will generate the file for you. Then open your accounting application and import the data. For example, the Quickbooks export produces and iif file. This can then be imported into Quickbooks which will generate transactions for you. Similarly a csv file can be opened and manipulated by Excel.
5. Bookkeeping online – Need bookkeeping help? There are several virtual bookkeepers who can help you with your bookkeeping online. Just send a twitter to @docsnaps or email marketing@docsnaps.com, and we will hook you up with a good bookkeeper or accountant.
Start Your Bookkeeping With Documents
Posted by vinkash in small-business on April 13, 2009
One of the biggest benefit of DocSnaps is that the painstaking work of creating bookkeeping entry from source documents – bills, invoices, receipts, checks, etc – is automatically done for you. There are other features like invoicing, creating expenses, printing checks and doing bank reconciliation, but these are similar to the other bookkeeping products and easy to understand.
Since documents data entry is unique to DocSnaps this article explains how to setup your company and get started with document categorization and transaction entry. Working with invoices, expenses, bank reconciliation, etc will be covered in future blog articles.
Company Setup – Before you start using DocSnaps for your routine bookkeeping work you have to first set up the company. Click on the Company -> Setup tab:
Each of the sections in the setup tab refers to a module in DocSnaps:
- Company Information – Address and other info
- Accounts Settings – Import or set up chart of accounts used by your company
- Tax – Taxes for invoicing and expenses
- Invoice Settings – Defaults for receivables and revenue account; import customers and items.
- Expense Settings – Default bank and payables account set up; import vendors.
Note: You need basic accounting knowledge to set up your company. You can work with your online bookkeeper (or find one in the marketplace) to help you with this work including importing your data (chart of accounts, customers, vendors, etc.) from Quickbooks or other software.
Get Started – Once your company is set up you can start using DocSnaps for routine bookkeeping.
1. Upload documents using any of the following methods:
a. Snap photos with your smartphone camera – Capture receipts, bills and other documents the moment you encounter them, and email them to your_user_name@receipts.docsnaps.com
b. Scan and upload – Easily scan your paper documents with an office scanner (Fujitsu ScanSnap, Kodak) and upload to Documents ยป Manage. Multiple files can be conveniently zipped up and uploaded.
c. Email – If you pay expenses online forward the email confirmation to your_user_name@receipts.docsnaps.com and it automatically gets stored in your documents repository. Similarly email invoices you send to customers either as as html or as attached PDF, and forward electronic documents (multiple documents can be emailed).
d. eFax – your eFax can be forwarded to your DocSnaps email address for easy capture of faxed documents.
Once you have all the documents in your document repository they will all be marked with the green icon as shown below. This is the status icon and indicates that the documents are not yet categorized and no transactions have been entered for them.
2. Categorize and create transactions with ease:
Click on the document ID to open the document in a new window as shown below:
Document details can be entered and based on the document type the appropriate transaction can be created – Expense, Deposit, Payment, etc. If you want to track receivables and payables then it is important to enter the customer or vendor and the due date for the expense or invoice.
The software learns as you categorize documents and create transactions. With sufficient data in the system it will start to automate document categorization and transaction creation. Any documents that are newly uploaded or which are un-audited (green icon) will be processed by DocSnaps. If DocSnaps is able to categorize the document and create a transaction it will appear with a gray icon in the document listing.
Over time DocSnaps should be able to handle most of the documents.
You can toggle the status icon between un-audited (green) and audited (orange tick mark). Click on the status icon until you get the orange tick mark and you have audited all your documents.
3. Manage your documents from document list:
a. You can delete documents
b. Split them into single pages (if it is a multiple page pdf file) or
c. Combine several pdf documents into a single large pdf file.
From the document show screen (the pop-up) you can delete the document and also move forward and backwards.
Note that the document cannot be deleted if there is a transaction attached to it or if it is associated with an invoice, expense or bank account.
4. Search the documents – This is a very useful feature and it is very easy to search through all your documents to find exactly what you are looking for.
You can specify the document type, the date range and enter a term or dollar amount you are looking for. DocSnaps searches through the comments entered, looks at the dollar amount and document name to find the document.
Simply start typing a word or amount in the search box and as you are typing DocSnaps queries your document repository to instantaneously retrieve documents that match the criteria.
As you use the document manager in DocSnaps you will discover several new users and shortcuts to make your business more efficient and your work pleasurable.