Yesterday I’ve had a discussion with my partner about organisation. And being at the intersection of nerd and German I got the need during it to reorganise my paperless-xng to make documents more accessible and sort them more reasonably.
Having <100 documents in there myself, as I haven’t done anything else than being in school / uni normally, I could not on my own find good patterns of what would help very well in sorting them. So came reasonably to the resolution that there are many many people that will have to sort through thousands of documents as a sole person or maybe even tens of thousands in the case of a business, they’ve surely come up with something and indeed they did.
I found a reddit1 comment that a outlined their own setup. Here important to mention is that until that point all I used for organisation were vastly too many tags, dates and auto-generated titles as well as the OCR.
The comment mentioned “correspondents” and “document types” that I was not using until that point. With correspondents I understood to be users within the same paperless instance (such as coworkers would be in a business setting) and expected to get no use out of that, but turns out you can also use it tag-like with the use of putting e.g. the institution there to get what the document is coming from or related to.
Currently I have the following correspondents:
- Arbeitgeber (employer)
- Bund (country)
- Finanzamt (IRS equivalent)
- Gemeinde (city)
- Versicherung (insurance)
- Privat (private persons)
- Privatfirma (private companies)
- oeffentliche Infrastruktur (public infrastructure, trains, television / radio)
- Uni
Then I have the following document types:
- bill
- certificate (e.g. birth certificate, degrees, etc.)
- contract
- letter or mail
- salary
- tan / pin / etc.
And at last a few tags:
- 20XX (one per year)
- undated
- critical (essential document, ID, birth certificate, etc.)
This system should allow a lot of scalability. The comment I’ve read mentioned having tags also for spouse, children, dog, etc. This I currently don’t have a need for ( :( ) but when I will then I can just add it without changing anything about my current system.
Paperless-ngx makes document management very maintainable and simple when done right + not just relying on OCR.
It also allowed me to add a e-mail address to upload documents to it. On this way I can then receive documents at something like “documents@e-mail.com” and upon adding them to the system I can automatically tag them with “letter or mail” and then later add the correspondent when I see it in the inbox of the system.
At last, I simply host it with a docker compose they’ve supplied in their repo. Everything works reliably and I’m happy with it.