Simplify Paper Management with Yep

So you’ve organized all your photos and your music. Now you just want to organize your paper. Yep? Yep might be what you’re looking for.

We don’t have to keep all the bits of paper that come into our life. Some, sure. Your partner probably won’t be too excited if you scan the marriage certificate and chuck the original. Scanned copies of your driver’s license that you print as required won’t win you any favors with the constabulary.

Despite being told we’re in a paperless world and everything is available online, it’s just not so. We still get a lot of paper in our lives which we don’t have soft copies of. Receipts, invoices, and warranties, for instance.

Just before I switched to the Mac I was looking for a solution to this very problem. That is, a way to scan all those bits of paper and save them in a database enabling me to piff the originals—or at least store them in a shoe box somewhere where I’d only have to dig them out for legal reasons.

Having soft copies can be a much more effective way of managing paper. Often we only need to refer to the document, not actually have the hard copy. If a soft copy is stored on a computer, it greatly saves time find it. Who hasn’t flicked through a file full of paper, just to check, say, a purchase date?

Yep is a paper management system, whether that paper is soft in the form of PDFs or real paper to be scanned.

Features

- Document tagging allows assigning of keywords to documents.

- Automatic scanning of your hard drive for PDFs. And fast!

- Documents are stored in their original location, not in any sort of database.

- Intelligent tagging uses breakdown of file path for initial tags, and suggests tags based on document content.

- Auto-tagging based on document content.

- Tags displayed by popularity.

- Grouping of documents in collections.

- Smart collections based on tags, document location, and document contents.

- Built-in scanner support allows scanning from within and directly to Yep.

- All scanned documents saved as PDF.

- Print directly to Yep from any application.

- Loupe preview magnifies the front page of the document.

- Search in Yep by Contents and/or Metadata.

- Built-in PDF viewer.

- Built-in file management.

- Easy to use and learn.

As Yep becomes more popular, the developers will get repeatedly asked to support other formats besides PDF. It’s easy to see why people would like to keep .doc and .xls and other files in Yep. Thus it is tempting to suggest “PDFs only” as a shortcoming of Yep.

Overall
It’s great to see developers setting the pace for Apple, and Yep has some features that Apple should borrow. The Loupe is number one. A magnifying glass in iPhoto would be a god send. Yep’s tagging is another.

If you handle a lot of PDFs and/or want to archive paper documents to disk, give Yep a look.