Steve Dotto here, how the heck are you this fine day?
Me?
I’m feeling quite fulfilled because my Evernote group, I’ve got an Evernote community on
Facebook which is there to support this great course that I’m delivering, but my Ever
Note community is giving me great ideas for demos.
What’s the great idea today?
A tool for the paperless office is a service that makes a paperless office, they claim,
effortless.
And you know something?
They just might be right.
Check out FileThis today on DottoTech.
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Now, we’ve got this Facebook group for Evernote made Easy which is the Evernote course that
we’ve been delivering for a little while now and it’s going gangbusters.
There are tons of people in the group exchanging lots of ideas and information about Facebook.
I’ll probably be coming back to this group quite often in future videos because they’re
offering me some wonderful suggestions.
Now the suggestion that they offered me this week that I want to take a look at is around
the paperless office and it’s a service called FileThis.
When I took a look at it, I was pretty impressed for a couple of reasons.
One is they seem to have kind of a unique take on helping you with common documents,
things like bills and invoices, things that you get on a monthly basis and putting them
in one place for you.
Now you can create filters and stuff like that as you receive messages by email, or
invoices or statements by email.
You can create filters and store them in Evernote and other places but what FileThis does is
it takes your documents, the common documents that you get, the bills, and it files them
all into one place.
Automatically, what it does is it retrieves them for you and then it will store them either
on their server and they give you about 500MB, which is a lot of space for documents, or
they also will store them in one of your cloud services.
So you can store them in Evernote, you can store them in Box, you can store them in DropBox
or Google Drive.
It’s your choice.
They file them logically so you can quickly find them and they’ve got dozens of companies
that they are retrieving your documents from.
So I thought what we might do is set it up together because it’s in a setup that a
lot of people kind of bump their heads.
They go, “I don’t know if I want to go through the whole setup process.
It sounds like it’s going to be difficult.”
Let’s do it together, shall we?
Before I begin, it’s free to sign up and they’ve got a pretty robust free service.
Take a look here.
Their free service allows up to six connections per month or having up to six connections.
So you can think of your MasterCard bill, your hydro or your electric bill, each of
those are going to be classified as a connection.
It runs once a week and it allows you up to 500MB of storage.
So that’s free.
As they say, “This is our best value.”
Really?
Free is the best you can do for me?
It’s free?
Well, okay.
Their premium service is $2 a month or $20 a year.
I like that so many of these services are pricing themselves in this very reasonable
range where you know it’s a small payment, less than you often pay monthly for other
services.
We see this with Task Clone that I showed you in a previous video.
Some really nice services that do some really great things and they keep them really affordable.
So $20 for a year and look, 12 connections.
This is probably more practical for most of us when you think about the number recurring
bills that we’re going to be getting.
It runs once a week.
You don’t need it all that often and up to a gigabyte of storage.
Then the Ultimate is at $5 a month or you can get it for $50 a year, about the same
price as you pay for an Evernote connection.
It allows up to 30 connections, runs daily and 10 GB and they’ve got different add-on
packs that kind of go on above that.
But it’s really simple.
All it does is it fetches your documents, files them and allows you to find them quickly.
So let’s just kind of go through the setup process, shall we?
Let me log in.
I have just signed up.
I haven’t done any setup.
I’ve had a look at the service, kind of figured out kind of how it works so you’re
going to see with me how you go about setting it up.
Now the first thing we need to do is choose our destination.
Since we’re Evernote, I’m an Evernote kind of guy, I’m going to set it up to sync
to Evernote so Connect this file to your Evernote account.
When you click the authorize button, you will be taken to the Evernote website which allow
you to authorize.
This is pretty standard with setting up anything that has an EPI level integration with Evernote.
So I’m just going to sign into my Evernote account, give it a year of authorization—I’ve
done this a few times with a few different apps—and now it’s authorize to work with
Evernote.
Excellent.
So that’s Step 1.
Step 2 is we need to start working with the different connections.
Now connections are basically institutions that we want to receive documents from.
Here is where our demo goes slightly off the rails because I live in Canada.
It looks to me that FileThis is mainly a US property.
Although, there are certainly going to be a few accounts that I probably could find,
looking through the list of their accounts, there aren’t Canadian institutions here.
We don’t have our civic taxes.
We don’t have our banks.
There are a bunch of Canadian banks but they’re all the American versions of Canadian banks
like TBN Bank and Montreal but they are all the US versions.
So it doesn’t look to me, unless I’m missing something and somebody emails something in
or comments, that it’s going to be great for people that don’t live in the States.
However if you are an American living in the States, look at the services that you can
draw your documents from.
It looks like all the financial institutions are there.
They have popular ones.
What are the popular ones?
Amazon is there.
Comcast, Paypal is there.
We’ve got Verizon so we’ve got your wireless services there.
All of the different financials are there.
This is the one that’s going to be interesting to me – utilities.
Let’s take a look at utilities.
Yeah, look at that, a lot of utilities.
Not as many State utilities as I might have thought, power and stuff like that, but you’ve
got some.
You’ve got a good selection and certainly the main financial institutions and the main
merchants seem to be there.
So all that happens now if you want to gather information from any of these, if you want
this system to go in and draw the documents out, is you choose one of them.
Let’s pretend that we want the Dish Network.
You put in your user account information and then your password and then you click on the
Connect link.
What will happen is that it will go through a connection process and draw the documents
out and look for any current documents.
Then once a week, it will be pulling the documents and it will store them either here in the
cloud services in their document area, which we can’t see because I don’t have any
documents, or in this particular case for me, it would migrate it directly into my cloud
service which I chose as Evernote.
It will then draw the documents automatically.
It eliminates the need for me to receive an email with the statement then file it in Evernote
and do all of that filing information.
I can’t see exactly how the naming convention is going to work so maybe somebody will post
a comment that’s using it on how the naming convention works and how easy it is for them
to find the files in the future but it does look to me like an outstanding service, especially
the free level which is for your main utility bills and your main financial bills and stuff
like that, to have it automatically go in to your paperless office storage repository
of choice, be it one of your cloud-based services or be it something like Evernote.
I hope I was able to show you a little bit more but it looks like a good service as it
is.
I’m hoping someday they’ll add more Canadian integration.
That will be something we’ll keep our eye on.
But until they do, all you American viewers enjoy.
Canadian viewers, let’s just keep on emailing our stuff into Evernote for the time being.
I hope you found this video today to be useful.
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Until next time, have fun storming the castle!