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Mariner's Paperless Application

Since day one of using computers I tried hard to be a paperless guy. One reason is that during the last 25 years of my professional life I was in involved in creating standards dealing with electronic data exchanges, the other simply being it is so much easier to track and find content when it is in an electronic format. BTW, I am not talking about electronic image files, as in JPEG, but machine processable formats such as PDF, SGML, XML, EDI only to mention a few.

Since the creation of machine processable file formats I have always made efforts to store my documents electronically. With the advancement of online ordering I also started to store my online receipts. However, over the years my hierarchical folder structure has become rather hard not only to maintain my setup, but also for finding things quickly, even with the help of spotlight.

Over the Holiday session I received an offer from Mariner Software to purchase their products at a largely reduced price. One item that caught my eye was the Paperless application because it allows not only the storage of documents but also the storage and handling of receipts. Quoting from their web site:

Using the Paperless Optical Character Recognition (OCR), you can scan your receipts, warranty cards, deposit slips and other paperwork and Paperless will automatically recognize and categorize these documents.

I downloaded Paperless and tried it out with my Brother MFC-5440CN scanner and a number of paper receipts. It works as advertised so I decided to purchase it.

Having now scanned in, as well as imported, my work and personal receipts for 2009, I am very happy with its receipts related functionality, especially the report feature.

I did find a few things that could be improved on regarding the receipts part of the product:

1. Add a subcategory, it would allow me to combine my personal and work receipts within one library instead of having to maintain two separate libraries. I do have receipts that need to be split into work and personal. Currently I have to add them to both :-(
2. Allow the Amount and Tax fields to function either as:
   • Tax included in amount; or
   • Tax in addition to amount.
3. Better OCR capture for date, merchant and reference fields.
4. Allow additions of custom tags to be used in searches and reports.

As much as I love the receipts functionality, I was rather disappointed in the documents feature, and after having tested to documents find it for now unusable to replace my hierarchical folder structure.

The main reason for me saying so is that I found in my testing that the application is removing the links contained with in the table of contents. Even opening the document from within the library using "Open in Preview" does no longer allow one to select a table of content item so that the page being linked to is immediately displayed. I tested it using Mariner own “Paperless User Guide”. Opening the User Guide with Preview, selecting on page 2 or 3 any of the ToC entries, results in the linked page to be immediately displayed.

Import that same the file into Paperless, and trying to do the same, either using the native View or "Open with Preview” does nothing — the build-in PDF functionality is gone.

I also tested a PDF document that comes with a "hierarchical Index" displayed in the Preview Sidebar (see screenshot below).

Importing it into Paperless results in the index disappearing. The sidebar instead only displays the thumbnails of each page:

Since most of my documents are large and either have a ToC page or Sidebar Index to allow for easy content locating, paperless is of no use for me to organize my documents. Even if I imported the files, I would have to keep them still around as I am not sure if Paperless did not process the PDF file and removed the links, or if it is a simple internal application issue that can be fixed to allow the ToC functionality without having to import the original files again.

Conclusion

For storing receipts Paperless does an excellent job, even with the few shortcomings mention. However, for storing documents I don’t recommend Paperless since it removes (or disables) the much used ToC link feature therefore eliminating easy navigation through large documents. Hopefully Mariner will address this problem to truly making Paperless more than a one trick pony.