Software Review - Yep

It’s been a little while since I’ve done a review, so here we go. I’m a big fan of going paperless as much as possible. Papers take up space, need a place to be stored, and always seems to be at the wrong place when you need them. Small headaches but still a headache. However, paperless pdf files pose their own set of challenges. You have to work from scratch creating folders to hold these files, you have to remember to place the pdf files into the proper location, and the worst, sometimes you wind up with pdf’s scattered all over you hard drive.

Enter Yep. Yep is great little piece of software designed to store pdf’s. Basically, it’s a one stop location all the pdf files on your computer. You can place the files directly into Yep, or, allow Yep to scan your entire drive for files. Yep will leave them in their location, but still show it in the browser.

The browser is where all the magic happens. Pdf files are shown in the middle window. A list of tags is in the left window. The window on the right changes with whatever happens to be clicked. When you work with a file, you have the ability to tag it. This is extremely powerful way to organize. Let me illustrate it.

I currently receive all my bank and credit card statements electronically as pdf’s. I drop them into Yep, tag them with a few keyword tags. Words like “Statements” and “Chase.” Previously, I set up some smart folders. Smart folders update themselves on the fly by looking for certain characteristics that you set up. I have a smart folder designed to look for any file that has the tags “Chase”, Statements”, “Checking”, and “2008.” So when I tag my bank statement with these keywords, it is automatically filed into that smart folder. I can either go to the folder to look at my statements or just start clicking on tags in the left column. Both ways get me very quickly to my statements. I have smart folders that search for such tags as “Manuals” and “Bills.”

I was a little dubious when I first got this software, but it has proven itself again and again. It’s the one thing that has made me a lot more comfortable moving more and more towards having completely paperless statements for all my bills.

Check it out at Ironic Software. Yeah, it’s only for Macs.