I have been searching for a practical way to manage my documents at home. While the amount of paper documents (letters, bank statements, etc) that I get is decreasing, I still like to have a way to archive them in a proper way.

I know the tendency is to not have these documents at all (’log in to your account to download your receipt’), but personally I don’t like that idea. What happens if (either by accident, or on purpose) the document disappears when you need it, how do you know it wasn’t changed?

About 15 years ago I bought an Epson GT-S50 - a dual sided document scanner - to scan all my documents. And although it did work well, the workflow just didn’t work. It comes with some software to manage the documents, but using that would really lock you into that ecosystem. And, starting up the scanner, processing the document, uploading it to the NAS etc, was just a hassle. So, after a few years I in practice just stopped using it.

Fast forward, and now we have a nice mobile phone, and software. In a sale I bought Turbo Scan for Android (but there are numerous similar apps), make a photo of a document (preferably with the page lying on a black background - a Lenovo Laptop works well…), it automatically crops it etc, and converts it into a PDF. So much faster and handier than using a 500 euro scanner.

But only when I found and tried Paperless (-ngx), the full workflow came to life. With Paperless installed (and PaperlessShare on my phone), I scan incoming documents, and push them into Paperless. There the documents gets assigned a tag ‘inbox’ so I know I need to process it (and can do that in batch once every while). The nice thing is that through OCR, it tries to automatically retrieve things such as date and subject, but these things are easily adjusted. I have three parts in my meta-data that I really store: date, sender and subject (which is usually the subject of the letter, but can also just be something like ‘receipt’ or ’letter’). Before using Paperless I already renamed my documents in the format <date>_<sender>_<subject>, and with Paperless I continue to do so (minimizing the lock-in).