Before I send in my taxes tomorrow, I want to do a spot check against all my bank transactions and receipts from 2005. When I applied for my mortgage, my old bank was able to print out a line item statement from the previous four months in 3 or 4 pages, so I was hoping for a small fee that Wachovia would print me out a 1/1/05 to 12/31/05 line item statement to review.

When I walked in over lunch the branch manager told me that there was a 3 week delay on orders because of tax season and each month for each account would cost me $5. Suddenly I had a 21 day and $120 motivation to round up my old statements by hand.

Unfortunately my daily-to-weekly filing system involves clearing out my bills and statements from my inbox by reviewing them and immediately scanning them into PDF files and throwing them into the shredder. Ocassionally I will sort out a set of pages into their own directory, but most of the time I'm just happy to have everything scanned and backed up digitally, so I leave the files in big directories of sequentially numbered PDF documents sorted by date.

And somewhere in those 1,200 pages from 2005 were all my statements.

I thought about it on my way home and realized a few things:

• I only needed to find 24 statements, or about 96 pages that would likely be grouped together.

• Some of the statements would already be in labeled and sorted directories. I could probably round them up pretty quickly.

• My scanning program does a quick OCR on the pages, so I could have the computer search for consistent and unique terms like HUNT VALLEY and WACHOVIA that would be present on every page that was part of a statement and return a list to check through before having to trudge through all 1000 files.

• Statements would never be in a directory from earlier than the month that they were scanned.

Mentally narrowing down the problem, I was able to turn a somewhat looming task into a game of checking off 24 grid squares on a piece of paper to represent what I still needed to find and put a 90 minute estimate on the task.

As it turned out, only 2 statements were already sorted out into labeled files, but the search function was able to flag around 100 unsorted pages with the phrase HUNT VALLEY, only around a dozen of which were pages from credit card statements and helped me find every scanned bank statement page from 2005 in about 45 minutes.

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