A lot of my clients in Green Bay hand me boxes of paper bills — no PDFs, no digital copies, just paper. I need to scan them all so I can work from my office. What scanner and settings do you recommend? Some of these bills have faded ink and small print that doesn't scan well at default settings.
Scanning paper bills — best practices for quality and organization
I use a Fujitsu ScanSnap — it's fast, does duplex scanning, and auto-feeds stacks of paper. Scan at 300 DPI minimum for utility bills with small print. Use the color setting rather than black and white because some bills use colored text or shading to distinguish line items. Save as searchable PDF so you can use Ctrl+F to find specific charges later. Name each file with the account number and billing month. It's tedious up front but having searchable digital copies makes the actual audit work much faster.
Walt's advice on searchable PDFs is key. OCR (optical character recognition) during scanning means you can search for specific dollar amounts, rate codes, or account numbers across dozens of bills instantly. For faded documents, increasing the contrast setting on the scanner usually helps. And always verify the scan captured all pages — utility bills that print on both sides sometimes get missed on the back if your scanner isn't set for duplex.