I have looked at paperless in the past and just asked why? I just spent a little time setting it up to see what it was about, then I spent hours configuring it and my email server creating paperless email addresses that other emails forward to! I cannot believe I have lived this long without it.
I run a small it company. Each month I have to sort all tax relevant documents and hand them to my tax office.
So I download the tx CSV from my accounts. Those get parsed and the relevant invoices get searched in paperless, so I see if something is missing etc with a few minutes of manual work.
I felt like a grown up once I got my paperless-ngx setup up and running.
I have a Scansnap ix1600 scanner. Everything is automated once I insert a document and click the button to scan it.
- Scanned documents are saved to an SMB share on my home server - it’s a built-in feature on the scanner.
- Paperless-ngx is watching that folder and grabs the files.
- Paperless-ai uses AI to add metadata to document (title, tags, correspondent).
For documents I need to keep a physical copy of, I give each document a consecutive ASN (archive serial number) using QR code stickers. When importing the document, paperless-ngx sees the barcode and attached the correct archive number to the document.
If I need to find the physical copy, I first find it in Paperless-ngx, look at the archive number, then look in a folder where the documents are arranged by archive number. Easy.
I haven’t looked into Paperless much, but what does your workflow look like exactly with regards to the emailing part?
I got an unlimitted email package from a host, before my journey into self hosting. I use a different email address for everything I sign up to or need to confirm I am human with. They all forward to 6 or 7 different emails I check I have just decided that those email addresses would forward to paperless email address to keep stuff sorted.
*edit I get next to no spam, if I do I either close the email or tell the company they have had a data leak and close the email.
Hold on, I’m a little confused. Are you talking about paperless the document management software (and it’s ng/ngx forks) or a different software with the same name?
Because you can set up mail inbox processing in that software but I’m not sure how that connects to forwarding to multiple different mailboxes, or vice versa profit from merging multiple forwards.
Sounds like OP does something similar to what I do. They setup different email inboxes or catchalls for different services, then as email comes in it gets forwarded to paperless for OCR/search maybe?
I do this with paperless-ngx, where I forward some emails to a dedicated address that paperless watches. But I do this manually with emails that have important PDFs attached.
I’m not sure what the benefit is of automatically forwarding everything to paperless. Seems like duplicating emails unnecessarily, when email clients already have search/folder functions. Also email servers have mail rules so they can be sorted based on sender/recipient/subject/etc…
Yes it is something like this, I do not have all of my emails go to paperless-ngx that would probably kill my little home lab.
I deal with a lot of financial and insurance things, having them go automatically to paperless-ngx was the plan but then I saw what I could do with automation and I spent hours setting up automation. As this is all new to me and I am dealing with some recent flooding I did not want to need to remember to start forwarding things I needed saved as pdf’s.
The automations include things that should not be forwarded to the paperless accounts, then each of the paperless accounts have rules on what to block if something slips through.
Asked myself which documents I have to keep for how long. I found this German Verbraucherzentrale article (Google translated) about document retention times.
But that information doesn’t give me a workflow. What are your workflows for new documents to scan(tags, correspondent, unique number). How do you keep track of out-aged paper which can be disposed? What’s your pdf backup strategy?
For backups I use Borgbackup with Borgmatic, to two different storage VPSes (hosted by two different providers in two different regions).
The main problem with Paperless is me. I just can’t be arsed to scan stuff, even though it’s almost entirely automated. The only thing that isn’t automated is me putting the paper into the scanner. Why am i like this?
Yeah you could not get me to go back in time to scan all of my docs but from now on a bunch of my emails automatically added to paperless, and I have found that I am actually putting things in there on my own now that it is installed and a bunch of automations happen.
I still feel like I’m living in the future using Paperless though I feel I must use it differently to everyone else as i haven’t felt the need to automate everything as it doesn’t always tag things to match my own specific tagging system.
For those that do automate everything, how do you overcome naming of documents? I want the scanned documents to have human readable names rather than the naming format of my scanner (or phone on occasion) or the naming format of XYZ company emailing me a document because in a catastrophe situation I want to be able to easily find & retreive vital/important .pdf docs from a backup rather than having to think about replacing equipment to set up Paperless again (in my instance aside from nightly Kopia snapshot backups I also export Paperless backups on device plus a secondary backup is automatically moved to a separate drive on my network & a third copy is encrypted & stored off site).
