What’s In Your Wallet? Fix The Mess With A Mac.

Organizing our lives requires even more organization. Some computer tools that claim to help us organize actually require an ongoing class to teach us to organize.

Not so with the Wallet twins—Documents and Receipts. What’s in your wallet or file cabinet? Fix the mess with a Mac.

There was a time when I may have resisted using my Mac as the top dawg organizing tool it can be. Slowly, the Mac became my digital hub and began collecting, storing, and sometimes organizing my digital life.

There’s digital music, digital photos, digital movies, digital documents, and so on. You get the idea, right? The Mac is great for digital files of all kinds.

What about paper? Are you ready for the Mac to take over all your paper documents? I’ve got a two tall file cabinets with so much paper that I’m afraid to look inside. There’s stuff in there that goes back to kindergarten.

It’s nice to store things, but I have no idea where to find it except to start looking through each manila file folder—one at a time, and hope I get lucky.

The digital age is here. Big business stores a lot of customer and vendor employee information on computers. Why not me?

The guys at ReceiptWallet have a similar issue but they have a solution. It’s just for Mac users. Receipt Wallet and Document Wallet. The metaphor is a stretch, but work with me. You’ll see how it fits.

Receipt Wallet is simply a place to store scanned copies of your receipts. A pile of receipts becomes files on your Mac, and Receipt Wallet works like iPhoto for receipts. All the stuff you save is easy to find, sort, categorize. Click, click, done.

The benefits become obvious very quickly as you decide to move from paper to digital. Expense reports? Grab the receipt from ReceiptWallet and send to whomever as a PDF, or print it.

How about warranty information? I have a single drawer in the kitchen which holds all my warranty information. If I need one, I have to look through them all.

ReceiptWallet scans your documents, lets you enter a little information about each one, categorize appropriately, then save. I save receipts in my wallet until I can’t fold it any longer, then they go into a shoebox. They stay there until the top won’t fit on the shoebox, then I put them in the file cabinet. Should I go digital, or what?

Likewise, DocumentWallet (somewhat misnamed because we don’t normally keep too many documents in our wallet—but I understand the metaphor) stores scanned copies of documents on your Mac instead of stuffed into file cabinets.

The process is similar to ReceiptWallet but aimed at the wider variety of documents. Scan the document, fill in the blanks, save. Repeat. Rinse. Lawyers live in the paper world but many are moving to digital document storage and retrieval. Ditto for the health community. It’s time the technology made to a Mac user.

Some Mac users will start with one, perhaps add the other. Yes, there’s a discount when you buy both.

Oh, I forgot to mention a very important point regarding this migration to a digital hub world view. You back up your iTunes music, your iMove videos, your iPhoto pictures, right? You back up your other important digital files, and email, right?

Ditto for Receipts and Documents. A solid, regularly updated backup plan is a must. OS X’s Leopard with Time Machine will be a big help. So will a big hard disk.

Are you ready to keep everything on your Mac? Scary, right? Yet we have so much on our Macs already, what’s another two or three thousand documents?

This requires some discussion. Do you save receipts and other documents on your Mac or PC? What application do you use? If you haven’t made the move to digital, why not?

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