Like most households, our letterbox is subject to no end of paper documents that never seem to stop coming. When I can, I go paperless with e-billing direct with the company. Three do it, as does EDF and a few others. But I still get bank statements, credit card bills and loads of other stuff in the post.

Recently I bought a Lexmark P205 S500 Printer/Fax/Scanner/Copier All-In-One device from Best Buy at Merry Hill. It seemed to be the best combination of affordable, support for Mac OS X and included an Auto Document Feeder (ADF) which seemed like a good idea, given the amount of paper I have to scan.

After unboxing and setting it up, I installed the included software on my MacBook Air and gave it a test scan.

The included software allows you to scan with its own Scan Center, or you can use Image Capture which is built-in to Lion. I gave both a try, but neither offered the sort of functionality I needed given I was archiving a few years of documents.

I took a look around at other software available. I tried Yep which offers a really nice interface for browsing files, such as PDFs, txt, images and some other file formats, and gives you the ability to tag them with keywords to help you sort and organise them.

I also took a look at the demo for PDFPen from Smile Software. It is probably the most well known PDF editing software besides Adobe Acrobat, and at a fraction of the cost, you can understand why. It will let you mark up, redact, join and split PDFs, and OCR your PDFs. However it isn’t built for bulk scanning.

I finally took a look at PDFScanner (iTunes Link), available in the Mac App Store. It offers a basic way of scanning but had a few features that made it ideal for me.

Firstly it allows you to scan in as many pages as you like. Once scanned in, PDFScanner automatically deskew’s and OCR’s each page. You can then scroll through the thumbnails of each page, and drag to reorder them. If you scanned in a long document, you hit Save and name your file, or use the auto-naming setting to build one based on date and time scanned. If you have scanned in multiple pages from multiple documents at once, as I have done, you can select the necessary pages and click Save Selected. This makes it really simple to just scan a bunch of pages and deal with them later.

The last stage of my paperless solution I have still to decide on, is the organisation. I have been putting some PDFs into Evernote, which allows me to sync the documents to the internet, and access them on my iPhone or iPad, as well as use Evernote’s own OCR for searching and tagging documents. The other option is to manage them locally, which I could either do by date or by subject/company.

Either way, I’m on my way to archiving my old documents and clearing a lot of paperwork. For £10.49, PDFScanner is a good spend, and was fit for my task.