Perhaps you’re on a business trip or maybe at a business lunch and wish there was some way you could digitize your receipts so that you don’t have to carry them with you. In an article published on the Australian Business Traveller, author Dan Warne examines the “Best Document Scanning Apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone 7.”
Scanning applications for your smartphone are intended to help you better manage those documents by taking a picture and then modifying them so that they look like photocopies which can then be uploaded to services (Dropbox, Evernote, Google Docs) that back them up and sync them to your desktop PC or laptop. Some of these online services also enable you to create PDFs of these documents which you can email. This then enables you to send document to others without paying hotel or office services to fax them for you.
Warne recommends the following scanning apps for the different smartphones:
iPhone: Genius Scan+. This app can be purchased at iTunes. It takes a photo of the document with the camera which can then be uploaded to Evernote and Google Docs.
Android: DocScanner. This app can be purchased at the DocScanner website and Android Market. This app takes a picture of the document which can then be uploaded to Evernote and Google Docs. You can also use this app to select the document’s actual paper size so that it can be viewed in its original size. DocScanner also enables you to email multiple-page documents as PDFs or JPEG files using a ZIP archive.
Blackberry: Cognicard. This app is free and available through Blackberry Appworld. While this application isn’t quite as complex as some of the others, it does enable you to scan business cards which are then emailed to you as Vcards with all the extracted data.
Windows Phone 7: Handyscan. This app can be downloaded from Handyscan Website and the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace and was the only one available when Warne’s article was written. This app is not as advanced as some of the others and doesn’t allow resizing by dragging a corner of the document to correct image distortion. It does, however, enable you to create a multipage document which can then be saved as a PDF or JPEG and sent via email or saved to the phone’s image library.
Depending on the smartphone you currently own, having access to a scanning app can help you more efficiently manage documents while on the go. Doing a little research to select the best one available can save you considerable time and energy.
If you like reading informative newsletters like this one, follow Universal Accounting on Twitter!
What apps do you find helpful? Post your comments here.
Resource
Warne, Dan. “Best Document Scanning Apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone 7.” 15 Dec. 2010 Australian Business Traveller