Having to deal with paperwork is a real pain, whether it’s hardcopy or digital. Tax documents, explanations of benefits from insurance companies, purchase receipts, prescriptions, bills, vaccination cards — the list of daily paperwork goes on and on. And of course, when you suddenly need to find that receipt for your two-year-old laptop, it’s nowhere to be found.
Google’s latest experimental app, Stack, is meant to help make that part of your life easier. A product of Google’s Area 120 incubator, Stack is designed to be the place where you can keep PDF copies of all those documents. As mentioned in our initial article, Stack borrows the technology underlying Google’s powerful DocAI enterprise tool for document analysis so it can organize them into categories — or, in Google-speak, stacks — and allow you to search for words within the text.
I have a lot of papers to keep organized. To keep their digital copies stored and accessible, I use a combination of Google Drive, Evernote, and a PDF-creating app called Tiny Scanner. It’s not an ideal solution, so when Google came out with a document scanning / organizing app, I thought I’d see what this Stack was all about.
BRING IN THE STACKS
First, a note: currently, Stack is only available on Android devices and can only be installed using a personal Gmail account, not a Google Workplace (formerly called G Suite) account. However, once you install the app, you can access documents saved on any of your Google Drive accounts, including Workspace accounts. This kind of confusion won’t be new to anyone who has to deal with juggling multiple Google accounts.
When you first open Stack, you are presented with a series of icons representing a variety of stacks, including Bills, Banking, House, IDs, Medical, Receipts, and Starred. If none of those suit your needs, you can click on an Edit link at the top right, and you are shown other stacks having to do with taxes, immigration, vehicles, and other categories, which you can add to your top-level stacks. You can also create your own stack by tapping on a plus button.
