I hate paper clutter. In an effort to reduce it and to get us ready to move our ministry totally into planningcenteronline.com (where all charts will be pdf), I purchased the Fujitsu Scansnap 510 for $380 from newegg.com. It might be the best investing purchase I have ever made. (Okay, after my wife’s engagement ring.) Here is the beauty of this thing in video form. My process:

1. I put up to 50 sheets in the loader and hit one button. The sheets going whizzing through at 18ppm.
3. The scanner picks up both sides of the page in a single pass through in full-color.
5. The doc is automatically converted to .pdf. And the Adobe Acrobat full program comes included (not just Reader but a full Standard Version, almost worth the price alone). Size doesn’t matter as I have run a small business card all the way to a huge long file of connected computer paper and the scanner/pdf convertor automatically sizes the pdf.
7. Then I simply hit scan to file and drop it into whatever folder I want.
8. 

1. I dump the paper documents into the recycled paper bin to be a good steward.

This thing is smoking easy to use. You only push one button and wallah! I just dumped out a whole file cabinet and my desk file cabinet. I can also attach any pertinent pdf’s to its corresponding vitalist.com action so my systems are becoming totally integrated…YEAH BABY…this thing is like crack for an efficiency freak! People keep walking into my office just to watch me scan. The ScanSnap S510’s image enhancement technology increases character recognition for more precise OCR accuracy so I can edit the .pdf after scanning. The bundled ABBYY FineReader software enables the user to scan documents directly to applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint software.

The only con in product reviews is that you must keep the in-take wheel clean or documents can get jammed. I have run a ton through and haven’t had to clean yet. After I remove staples from a doc, I fan them to make sure they are not stuck together. When I didn’t, it gave me a few jams which are super easy to remove. Just push one button, open the front panel and pull.

For all you Mac users, make sure you order the ScanSnap 510M so your scanner and Adobe software will work.