I read a good entry over at Signal V. Noise about how to go paperless by using an expensive duplex scanner from Fujitsu. While I still think this is a great way to do it, and I may even buy one of those scanners, a while back I came up with an easier and far cheaper way to scan my mail and documents into a digital form and have been using it for a while.
Most offices, like mine, have fax machines or fax copiers. I also have a fax to email service through my toll-free provider, Ring Central, where your fax documents are scanned and emailed to you as PDF attachments. If I ever want to archive a paper document into a digital form, I just fax it to myself and save the PDF to my computer. I also leave a copy in my gmail account where I can access the file from anywhere.
The only downside I have discovered is that the faxed PDF is not transformed into indexable text via OCR (optical character recognition) during the scanning process. I compensate for this shortcoming by giving each document a readily comprehensible file name. If you fax each document at a high enough resolution you may be able to perform OCR on the output, however the descriptive file naming used in conjunction with Google Desktop Search has worked well for me.
[...] Bridging the gap between the online and the offline: Use postful to send snail mail to any address from the web. $1 a letter. I like things like this. Just wish I had someone to send mail to. I’ve also been using Fresh Books for my invoicing. I love it! Now when I need to send someone an invoice via snail mail I can do it through my Fresh Books account and it only costs $1. Everyone else can just pay online. They even send the invoice with a return payment envelope and a printed link to pay online. This is way easier than printing everything out from Microsoft Money and mailing myself, which I used to do and why I only invoiced every 2-3 months. Use this referral link if you’re interested and you will make me rich. Other ideas for bridging the gap: The Cheap and Easy Way to Go Paperless. [...]