How To Hack Bookkeeping

A guide started by Paul Brown on how to make bookkeeping suck less.

Making It Easier To Find Receipts

Step 1

Buy an almost regrettably expensive receipt scanner.

• Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 ($420)

Step 2

Acquire a copy of Adobe Acrobat X Pro (at least).

Step 3

Copy all of the receipts with the scanner, use Adobe to split the giant PDF into individual receipts (Tools -> Pages -> Split Document), then use Adobe’s OCR on all of the files (Tools -> Recognize Text -> In Multiple Files).

Step 4

Use Adobe’s “Advanced Search” (Shift + CTRL + F) to search the folder of OCR’ed receipts.

Use Macros

• Use AutoScriptWriter to record macros: http://www.autohotkey.com/download/AutoHotkey.zip
• Play them back using Autohotkey