Contracts, Appliance Invoices, insurance, Kids' documents, Receipts, Fines, government documents, bills, tickets, passes etc. Are basically taking ages to find, even if we were wise to take a picture would take ages to refind.
I have both OneDrive and Dropbox, the UX is horrible for these simple searches. I know that Shoebox exists, but paying at least 18$ a month for wanting to store my documents on my phone in a neat way looks to much of a demand for me. (and that has a limitation). I'm not even asking for a fancy OCR.
Is there an app out there for this? What do you use?
appliances/fridge/2018-01-03-purchase-receipt.pdf
appliances/oven/2019-11-18-repair-invoice.pdf
medical/insurance/2022-02-03-insurance-card.pdf
automotive/registration/2022-09-10-registration.pdf
automotive/tickets/2019-09-10-parking.pdf
phone/t-mobile/2020-01-14.pdf
phone/pixel5a/2021-03-14.pdf
With two directory levels, you should be able to organize it so that all the top level directories fit on one screen of ls output / file explorer or whatever you want to use, as well as each second level.
I always prefix the filenames with YYYY-MM-DD, and I add a suffix with any extra keywords that might be helpful or to disambiguate several things from the same day, but in many cases it's obvious if the directory is just full of one bill per month or whatever, in which case I just do the YYYY-MM-DD.ext filename.
The system is largely optimized for having a place/filename to store things without too much thought, rather than retrieval since 90+% of things you store never actually need to look at again, and I don't mind clicking around for a few minutes for the rare occurrence when I do need something.
If you put this structure in google drive or similar you'll get OCR + keyword searches on the filenames for free, but you can also just sync it to any local filesystem to use "manually", or upgrade to the next latest and greatest cloud storage or whatever.
Paperless then OCRs the documents and stores the original and a PDF/A version for long term archival. It learns from my tagging and classification and auto classifies them in the future.
The web interface is also pretty slick and allows you to do full text search on all your documents really fast.
Tagging and categories is also a more superior form of organisation than simple folders.
I separate documents that are concerned with income, expenses and taxes into financial-year folders, further subdivided into a tree-structure of named folders.
2022/bills_statements/centrepoint801/801_water_211026.pdf
2022/bills_statements/centrepoint801/amart_tv_unit_210816.pdf
2022/bills_statements/centrepoint801/cpoint801_ergon_210731.pdf
medical/jack/jack_respiratory_2019-/bretz_referral_200213.pdf
medical/jack/jack_respiratory_2019-/jack_bretz_info_consent_191030.pdf
medical/jack/jack_respiratory_2019-/jack_patient_details_bretz_191030.pdf
medical/jack/jack_respiratory_2019-/jack_191125_bretz.pdf
real_estate_ours/marquis/marquis_504_market_appraisal_TS_220203.pdf
real_estate_ours/kamerunga_6/steel-line_garage_door_user_manual.pdf
real_estate_ours/york/obrien_real_estate_commision_york_131004.pdf
I store most documents as .PDF files, photos as .PNG images. I include a date if relevant using a 6-digit YEAR-MONTH-DAY format which will normally automatically order documents by date when useful.
2020/antonas/clovelly_even/20cre190731.pdf
2020/antonas/clovelly_even/20cre190830.pdf
2020/antonas/clovelly_even/20cre190930.pdf
2020/antonas/clovelly_even/20cre191031.pdf
Incoming 'paper' documents are scanned too and stored along with similar computer-generated documents.
1. Buy a Fujitsu ScanSnap.
2. Buy a wall mounted folder rack (something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Klickpick-Office-Organizer-Multipurpo...) and mount it near the scanner.
3. All paper, put in the folder when it comes in.
4. Once a week, scan everything in the folders. Scanner turns paper into OCR'd PDF.
5. Set the scanner to scan to a Dropbox folder.
6. I name my files YYYY.MM.DD_Organization_DocTitle. The rest can be searched for since it's OCR'd.
Eg: Ju brazilian Birth cert translation + original 2019.pdf
Then we just have Everything running in the back ground and search for whatever we need using that as it indexes all your files in real time and is very lightweight.
Everything is lighting quick when it comes to filtering a list of file names so we usually find what we need in a couple of seconds... Super easy to pull up too as they offer a global short cut key. Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E in our case...
Looking at the settings just now, there’s an auto-upload option in there I haven’t taken advantage of yet, that allows for popular sync services as well as WebDAV. Which means I could configure this to auto upload docs to my NAS. I need to get on that…
Anyway, that app is pretty great in my experience. I think it even does OCR when converting to PDF automatically.
But primarily, the icon brings up a quick menu of favorite folders, more folders, or new folder.
Do you think that would that be of use to you?
Backup every couple months with Takeout in case I get locked out.
I have both on-site and off-site backups; I have no desire to put personal information of that sort on anyone's web server.
I saved it for another reason, but in it he solves for "X". Maybe it will help you.
Seems to work pretty well. I have to refer to receipts in it all the time.