Depending on the volume of documents you have, and how often you need to select texts from these documents, you might be able to skip out the OCR stage entirely.
I've only really recently started an adult life (I'm age 22, , and as such I've had the opportunity to be as paperless as possible from the start.
I use cloud storage as much as possible (I have 100GB Google Drive) so that all my stuff is accessible from any browser, or more easily from my desktop, laptop, and smartphone.
As many of my bills, statements, etc. as possible are either delivered digitally, or are digitised by me and then the paper copy is shredded. For the latter, I pretty much exclusively use my smartphone camera.
Here's a list of stuff that I keep digitally:
- Water, gas, internet, and electricity bills
- Monthly bank statements from three accounts
- Council tax letters/bills (I've just started work so we've had a few of these recently)
- Scanned receipts of large purchases
- Payslips
- Pension documentation
- Credit card correspondence
- Driving license and passport correspondence
- Student loan documentation
The only paper copies of things I have are ID-related.
These are all organised in a Documents folder in the root of my Google Drive. I find that the volume of documents isn't great enough to require a tagging system (5-6 items per month), and that just placing them in a sensibly-named folder is enough. I have a folder for pretty much every category I listed above. Some documents exist more than once, such as utility bills which are stored in, for example, a Bills\Water folder, but are also stored in a folder named for the residence. I think this is the only situation where tagging could improve things by reducing storage requirements, but storage is so cheap nowadays that it's not really an issue.
One important thing to have is a consistent, sensible naming scheme for your documents. Mine works as follows:
"[date]_[document type]_[company]_[extra info]"
example:
"2015-05-01 Payslip CovUni £225"
For these, make sure to use the international standard for data+time formatting (
ISO 8601) which goes, logically, year-month-day-hour-minute-second. This means that, provided that the date is the first field, all your documents are very easily be sorted by date regardless of what system you are using.
