Use your digital camera as a scanner - Receipts!

Have you ever had a problem in front of you forever, had all the tools and never put it all together?  One of my principles in life is to "Achieve 'impossible' tasks by using things in a way not intended".  So in this case, our business needs to scan all of our receipts for our clients to have a record of them.  So we took the thought path of taping receipts to pieces of paper and putting them through our paper scanner.  This is great except we only have one scanner and it's at our office and quite often we going from event to event and never touch the office.  Also, many of our contractors don't even have fax machines so this solution also doesn't work for them.  Doing 'Final Expenses' for an event after the fun and excitement is over is one of the greatest sources of pain and frustration in our company.  Also, we want to do it as FAST as possible so we can invoice our client promptly.  This is one of those things that if you don't do it at the event, the odds of you doing it go down by 50% every day after the event (i.e. 100%, 50%, 25%, 12.5%, etc.). 

Sooooo, I'm in my hotel room and I'm up late and I just want to get it done.  I'm thinking, where is a scanner?  And suddenly, my digital camera jumps up into my vision.  Duh...we pack 3-20 'scanners' with every event and NOBODY figured it out!  I take out my receipts, lay them out on the white sheet of my bed and shoot a photo.  The first one is washed out.  Zoom a little and shoot at an angle, BANG, it's a perfect photo!  I download, but each photo is 1-2MB. I try to combine them all into one PDF document and the file is 16MB!!!  Too big.  I set it back to 640x480 and shoot again.  This time each photo is 100k.  I highlight all the photos, right click and combine into one PDF, about 500k for 5 photos.  It's awesome!  I upload my receipts and my 'Final Expenses' spreadsheet and celebrate because I'm done only ONE day after my event!

Now think about it.  All of the tools were there, but I never thought of my digital camera as a receipt scanner.  Forget another device as a paper scanner, just use what I got!  What problem are you stuck on that has a better solution?  What has to happen for you to think about doing it in a better way?  When are you going to share that solution and make a difference in other people's lives?

Comments

[Jeffrey McManus]

You might want to have a look at www.scanr.com -- you can send photos from your cameraphone to them via email and they will actually clean up and fax documents to others that way.