Effort-free, box-it-up paperwork management

[James Laver]

My flat is a tip, my desk is atrocious and my crate of paperwork
(unsorted of course) is getting out of control.

I want to fix it because I can't go on like this, does anyone have any
experience in sorting it all out?

What I currently have in mind is a document store where I scan
something, and it's saved as a PDF into a set-aside directory. Ideally
I'd be able to tag it with various things 'e.g. tax bill' and it'd be
sorted nicely by date as well.

I was thinking that for each year, I'd have a set of coloured box
files and each file within it would be given a unique numeric id. I
could then locate a paperwork item by e.g. "2009 red 456" which I'd
tag the file with. I have a pdf so i only really need to keep things
on paper for legal reasons etc.

Does anyone else have experience of doing something like this, have
suggestions on a better way of doing it, etc.?

Also, bulk scanning, is there somewhere I can outsource this to? Any
students want to provide cheap labour etc.?

--James