A digital archive you can search, share and back up - where a document takes seconds to find, not an evening of digging through drawers. The system matters more than the scanning speed.
The workflow
Sort paper into piles by category first - receipts, contracts, IDs, certificates
Scan each pile in one session with the phone scanner - continuous capture handles dozens of pages quickly
Generate one PDF per document, not one giant PDF per box
Name files descriptively: 2025-01_Receipt_Store.pdf beats scan001.pdf
Store in a cloud folder with a simple subfolder per category or year
Quality standards
Colour for anything with stamps, signatures or photos
Black & white for pure text documents - much smaller files
Check each page is readable at 100% zoom before deleting the paper
Keep the paper originals of legal documents even after scanning
Keeping it manageable
Compress finished PDFs before archiving - a year of household paperwork should fit in a few dozen megabytes. Back up the folder somewhere off your computer: cloud drive, external disk, or both.