Noodlesoft Forums

Hey guys,


I have a paper workflow for my receipts currently in which I do the following and would like to duplicate electronically:
- Highlight the name of the company and amount on the receipt with a green highlighter
- Scan w/ scan snap that is set to save all highlighted words as keywords when it OCR's
- The files gets dropped in a folder that hazel is watching. Once hazel sees that it matches the following
- File contains keywords
- File contains a date match (I have a bunch of different rules to capture all the different formats of dates)
- File contains the last for digits of the credit card I want this processed to use with.
- Then Hazel renames based on the the highlighted words and date which gives me something like (04-14-14.Company Name.$14885.44)
- Hazel then sorts into a folders/and sub folders by date.


So I love that workflow, I take a couple seconds to manually highlight and scan and magic happens.

What I can't figure out is how to do this with receipts that I get emailed or that I get online. I know how to save all of these as PDF's but is their an electronic equivalent of highlighting something and having hazel assign those highlights as keywords?

I know I can just type in the keywords but the only way I've figured out to do it is having to open preview and click a few buttons to get it, which seems pretty clunky.

I'm considering just printing everything out and paper highlighting, which seems like i'm going backwards since I'm trying to make all of these paperless......

I think that's a function of whatever PDF program you are using. I feel like there must be something out there which will let you select a word and have it enter it as a keyword. Maybe Acrobat or PDFPen?

I add keywords to my scanned files often and it's not that bad. I use preview as my PDF reader. There isn't too much mouse movement. You can open inspector with a keyboard short cut, Command-i.

Only mouse movement is clicking the + button to add the keyword. Type your keyword and click the mouse again to add another keyword. I can add my keywords (client name, document name, date, time, location) pretty quickly. I use TextExpander to create shortcuts for type the various document names and locations I use, so that speeds things up a bunch.

Hazel uses the keywords to make entries into my filemaker database and add information to my calendar. The time I spend on adding keywords is far less than the time I would have to spend on the database entry and calendar entry.

Alternatively, when you save the file from your email, you could rename the file with the company name and amount. Then Hazel could rename the file to add the date of the receipt to the name, then process it normally?