The start of the new year brings lots to look forward to, but it also signals the start of a necessary financial task: Taxes. For 2019, resolve to make it easier on yourself by learning how to use your Android phone or tablet as a document scanner.
You’ve got a stack of receipts and other tax-related documents piling up, but it’s a breeze to digitize them when you harness the right app. You don’t need a standalone scanner that’s plugged into a computer. Your camera-equipped Android device already has all the right stuff to help you out.
While document scanning with Android can be critical as you prepare your tax files, keep it in mind for other times of the year. You can use to scan school assignments or letters, share business papers, or back up important personal documents. All you need is the right app.
Scan with Google Drive
Google Drive users have a fast option for scanning documents. Open your Google Drive app on your phone and tap on the plus sign in the circle at the bottom. Tap on the Scan icon that looks like a camera. Point the camera at the document and tap on the round button to take a picture.
You can now refine your scan. Tap on the crop icon near the top and adjust the corners if necessary. The checkmark saves your changes. The paint palette icon lets you put the document into black and white if needed, or you can select a color option. The three dots in the corner let you rename the document or rotate it. Touch the check mark at the bottom to save it to Drive for easy access or sharing.
While this is a quick way to add documents to Drive, there are also some apps that give you more powerful scanning features. Check out two of our recommendations.
Discover the world of “lite” apps that won’t take up too much space on your Android phone.
Adobe Scan
Adobe is famous for its photo-editing software, but it’s also the company that invented the PDF format. Its free Adobe Scan app for Android is all about turning your physical documents into handy PDFs. One of the nice features in this app is optical character recognition (OCR). The app will recognize text in your documents so you can search and edit them later.
Adobe Scan’s automated capture works well. It will find the corners of your document and ask you to hold your phone steady while it snaps a picture. It then automatically crops it. You can capture multiple pages, or tap on the thumbnail of the photo to edit the scan. The editing menu at the bottom of the screen lets you crop, rotate, and adjust the color of the document. You can also reorder pages if you scanned multiple documents together.
Tap on “Save PDF” to save your document to the Adobe Document Cloud, an online storage feature. From here, you can also share it through a link or choose “Share a copy” to send the actual document via email or another method, or to save it to Google Drive.
Be prepared should you ever lose your Android phone. Here’s what you need to do.
Bonus: Another scanning option
Tax season is right around the corner and you need to be organized. With Epson’s receipt scanners and ScanSmart accounting software, it can all be done in three easy steps — scan, manage and export. Organize your receipts, invoices and documents quickly, then export to popular accounting software — NO subscription needed. Visit Epson.com/ScanSmart today!